Why is it that every single nazi and white supremacist you've ever met will tell you that communism is evil?? Hmm, I wonder. Might it be because they use capitalism to get away with racism and discrimination? I think yes, that's really what's it about.

You see under capitalism they have a way to be totally racist while being able to claim that they're not. This gives them the safety net they need in order to continue white supremacy. They will claim that it's all a matter of the "free market" and that all people have "equal opportunity" under capitalism, because that's what they need to say in order to make it SOUND like they are tolerant and reasonable. But in fact, all the really smart ones know deep down that this a just a way to keep white supremacy going, because they know that under capitalism those who are in power will STAY in power, and that's what they really want. They want to keep and maintain all the power they already have. I mean come on it's obvious.

By definition capitalism is not racist. Capitalism seeks profit and if profit is higher with black then capitalism goes with black. Why are NBA teams owned by white men nearly 100% black?

]]>2019-05-25T00:42:55+01:002019-05-25T00:42:55+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175922&p=15007224#p15007224Pants-of-dog wrote:Yes, capitalism is racist, but not because it is inherently racist, but instead it is because of how history and economics has happened in the last few centuries.

This is an important distinction to point out. Your other points are valid as well. However, I want to point out another thing which is a bit more abstract. This doesn't contradict what you stated, it just further explores the topic.

Capitalism is fundamentally different from Communism in the sense that Capitalism was never invented, where as Communism was invented. That is, Capitalism is an emergent property of natural human trade interaction. Capitalism wasn't invented, it was discovered. Whereas Communism is an idea and invention. This fundamental difference is basically why Capitalism has taken root so easily. It's more "natural" and more inline with natural human instincts.

Now, this is why Capitalism is racist. It's not that Capitalism is inherently racist, it's that people are naturally racist, or more precisely, people are tribal. As we know tribalism is at the core of racism. Thus, to end racism in capitalism, you have to end racism in people. I would say, in order to have socialism/communism, we would also need to eliminate racism in people.

I wonder, what would a non-racist capitalism look like? WOuld it be any better than it is today? I think no.

]]>2019-05-24T23:30:24+01:002019-05-24T23:30:24+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175922&p=15007215#p15007215Pants-of-dog wrote:Yes, capitalism is racist, but not because it is inherently racist, but instead it is because of how history and economics has happened in the last few centuries.

Right. Capitalism favors the privileged, and privilege is based on power, which has often been unequal between races. The effect is that capitalism favors whichever race has the most power and privilege. In many countries that have significant racial diversity, that race is white (i.e., European) because whites from advanced European colonial powers colonized them centuries ago. But in some places it is not. In Singapore, the Chinese are generally more privileged than whites.

Or keeping the working class divided by talking about how the white working class is oppressed by everyone else.

Even if the working class is not divided, race makes a convenient distraction from privilege.

The examples are numerous, and all show how racism is used to perpetuate capitalism. But this is merely the opportunism of capitalism, and is not a necessary trait of capitalism.

]]>2019-05-24T19:22:23+01:002019-05-24T19:22:23+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175922&p=15007164#p15007164Colonialism, or capitalism at gunpoint, did not need to use racist ideas about white man’s burden in order to exist and maintain itself, but it did make all the genocide and slavery more palatable to the European public. This way, they could pretend they were “civilising” the rest of the world.

This is still being done by portraying Muslims as savages who need our help to achieve democracy, and it really is just an excuse to take their oil. Or portraying Venezuelans as incapable of protecting their democracy from corruption.

Or the racism directed at undocumented migrants, who have even less opportunity to fight their economic oppression because of said racism.

Or keeping the working class divided by talking about how the white working class is oppressed by everyone else.

The examples are numerous, and all show how racism is used to perpetuate capitalism. But this is merely the opportunism of capitalism, and is not a necessary trait of capitalism.

But it does show how fighting racism and fighting capitalism are mutually beneficial.

Why is it that every single nazi and white supremacist you've ever met will tell you that communism is evil?? Hmm, I wonder. Might it be because they use capitalism to get away with racism and discrimination? I think yes, that's really what's it about.

Leftists are always pretending that America, of all places, can "get rid of racism". Why can't we "get rid of"... murder, and rape, and armed robbery? Would anyone here rather be murdered, raped, or robbed than called a racist epithet? Call me "cracker" any day. Maybe you've never heard of "sticks and stones can break my bones," junior, but it's true. You talk like a high schooler.

As of January, 2017, California's homeless population was 134,278, far ahead of second place, New York with 89,503. California has 22% of the nation's homeless but only 12% of the nation's population. (Source www.usich.gov)

San Francisco Needles and Poop EverywhereThis Sanctuary City provides 400,000 free needles a month to drug addicts who throw them on the streets downtown and then defecate

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. - Winston Churchill

You know you live in a great country when the people who detest it refuse to leave. - Candace Owens

Every citizen of California is in debt $22,000, the seventh highest public indebtedness of our fifty states, according to www.truthinaccounting.org. The other six states worse off are all of course overwhelmingly Democrat, with New Jersey by far the worst at $61,400 in debt per citizen.

With a median home price of $502,000, the homeownership rate is 55.2%, second lowest in the country, behind only New York, at $369,267 median price and a rate of 50.9%. (2018)

]]>2019-05-20T19:55:01+01:002019-05-20T19:55:01+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175824&p=15006170#p15006170Statistics: Posted by Pants-of-dog — 20 May 2019 19:55
]]>2019-05-20T19:50:47+01:002019-05-20T19:50:47+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175824&p=15006169#p15006169Pants-of-dog wrote:Yes, but not in a debate.

This forum, like most, is not remotely "a debate." Clearly you have no idea as to what a "debate" consists of.

1. A debate has formal rules, which of course prohibit profanity exhibited by Godstud repeatedly.2. A debate has a semblance of balance. That is impossible where Leftists congregate. They gang up on any poor unsuspecting soul and pummel him with condescension, pretension, arrogance, and numbers which seek to silence all dissent from your Leftist orthodoxy.

You could take the time to look up statistics on world poverty, showing that the average human lives on a dollar or two a day, but that would take some effort and you would rather order others around, so that you can then condemn and criticize anything they might present.

If I never again respond to anything you write, it will be because you have consistently been rude and had nothing to say worth reading.

]]>2019-05-20T19:36:00+01:002019-05-20T19:36:00+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175824&p=15006164#p15006164Pants-of-dog wrote:You do realise that you have linked to an editorial and not an actual news article, and that editorials reflect the OPINION of the author and not an objective analysis?

Also, you should quote the text that supports your claim, since it is not up to the reader to build your argument for you.

Everyone expresses opinions based on their particular analysis of facts, don't they. You simply try to discredit those opinions, and or facts which do not comport with your own. If you had any data at all to support the nonsense prattled by you and your America-hating friends, you would have presented it by now. But not one of you has done that. It's obvious why.

CNN does nothing BUT spout opinions, based on lies, and it has millions of followers, like you.

]]>2019-05-20T15:27:10+01:002019-05-20T15:27:10+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175824&p=15006104#p15006104Take the New York Times, please. It ignored the Holocaust as it raged in Germany because the publisher hated Jews. It falsified the situation in the USSR and failed to report millions of people starved by Stalin in the 1930s and continues its left-wing lies to this day.

Read and believe such tripe.

Unfortunately this forum does not appear to have an IGNORE FUNCTION, that would black out childish profanity and ignorance prattled by one sociopath in particular.

Hayek argued that society “should” (for both consequential and moral reasons) have a guaranteed minimum standard of living for its citizens:

"There is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom. …. [T]here can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. … Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individual in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision.

Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.

There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supercede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatability in principle between the state’s providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.

To the same category belongs also the increase of security through the state’s rendering assistance to the victims of such ‘acts of God’ as earthquakes and floods. Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken.

There is, finally, the supremely important problem of combating general fluctuations of economic activity and the recurrent waves of large-scale unemployment which accompany them. This is, of course, one of the gravest and most pressing problems of our time." (F. A. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 1944, Pages 148-149)

Lol, the opinion of one contributor to a right wing magazine is not evidence of anything.

Overall, we rate Forbes Right-Center biased based on story selection that tends to favor the right and the political affiliation of its ownership. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to misleading or false stories related to climate science.

And touring a country does not make anyone an authority on social conditions in that country. When we lived in the UK - my parents took me on visits to 26 countries, including yours, but I wouldn't dream of claiming I know all about the poor in any of those places.

]]>2019-05-20T02:35:29+01:002019-05-20T02:35:29+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175824&p=15006017#p15006017 You're the typical American tourist that goes to McDonalds in another country, then @MrWonderful! Your claim shows a huge amount of ignorance about other countries, and cultures, where maybe everything is not centered around materialism, as it is in USA.

]]>2019-05-20T02:17:13+01:002019-05-20T02:17:13+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175824&p=15006010#p15006010Godstud wrote:Ah, I can see @MrWonderful has never actually travelled, or he'd know this isn't true. Another know-it-all American.

]]>2019-05-20T00:20:49+01:002019-05-20T00:20:49+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175824&p=15005988#p15005988Red_Army wrote:The poor where? The poor get poorer all over the world.

You have absolutely NO IDEA whereof you speak. NO IDEA whatsoever.

The "poor" in America generally live as well as the middle class anywhere else in the world.Why else is everyone trying to come here, many as college students, after which they remain and bring all the relatives they can.

]]>2019-05-18T12:07:32+01:002019-05-18T12:07:32+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15005501#p15005501They say that the raising of animals in factory farms produces more carbon dioxide emissions than everything else, so this is a 'must' and a 'win-win' in terms of global warming:

]]>2019-05-18T03:11:42+01:002019-05-18T03:11:42+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15005418#p15005418About shooting your classmates with an AK-47, Truth to Power wrote:But it might well make them more able to survive scarcity.

Like the scarcity we will soon experience from our stripped down and poisoned environment?

Seriously, you are really good out of arguing against the survival of our species. None of your points above are credible - some of them are just empty plays on words (discrete increments as opposed to slowly), and other points are just industry propaganda from 40 years ago.

Your texts demonstrate that mankind's worst form of pollution has been complexity, as this has rendered him incapable of understanding science or the reality around us.

And the complex number-games of Economics - usually divorced from any comprehension of their inevitable side effects - is one of those complex stupidities that masquarades as "smart."

]]>2019-05-17T20:14:52+01:002019-05-17T20:14:52+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15005368#p15005368QatzelOk wrote:And yet the document is called "The Origin of Species" and not "The Origin of Super Strong Individuals."

(Please read a few Sparks Notes on this document to improve your understanding of what Darwin meant by "strong" and by "selection.")

<yawn> Please read, "The Selfish Gene." It's a little more up-to-date than Darwin.

Genetic changes occur very slowly, and don't necessarily make an individual organism "stronger" from a survival point of view. These changes can't be induced or choreographed by people. We will never "select" for the correct criteria.

Wrong again. Genetic changes occur suddenly in discrete increments, which then may or may not slowly become predominant in a population through natural selection.

It is the natural elimination (by nature) of certain individuals that creates a strong species that will survive NATURE.

No, species are also temporary, just not as temporary as individuals.

See, Ak-47s won't help defend against bacteria, disease, or climate change. These will just help certain people to kill other people. Being able to kill other people (with technology) will not make your offspring more apt to survive disease or bacteria.

But it might well make them more able to survive scarcity. Which is kinda the point of economics, isn't it?

Humanity is facing extinction with all our nuclear bombs, Ak-47s and video games.

Nope. Wrong again. The only possible risks to our existence as a species in the short to medium term are SAI, self-reproducing nanotech, and bioweapons.

None of this technology has made any of us stronger,

Flat false. Vaccination, for one, has made us a lot stronger.

and many of these technologies have permitted the "weak" to survive and eliminate "the stronger."

Not the stronger in fact, only the stronger in your opinion. Survival defines who is actually the stronger.

Meanwhile, bacteria, which has no technology, is in no danger. It is (survival) stronger than mankind currently.

Bacteria are thousands of species, not just one. And so far we have been surviving and reproducing far better than any bacterial species -- other than the ones that live in our intestines.

]]>2019-05-17T20:08:45+01:002019-05-17T20:08:45+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176342&p=15005367#p15005367Statistics: Posted by Sivad — 17 May 2019 20:08
]]>2019-05-17T19:51:46+01:002019-05-17T19:51:46+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176342&p=15005363#p15005363SolarCross wrote:That might not be such a bad idea but I think it is tricky on human dignity.

Also justice, liberty, and motivation. People only have a right to the things they would have if others did not deprive them of them, mainly life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor. That lets out a right to income, which would have to be provided by others' labor. So restoring people's liberty to access economic opportunity without having to pay landowners just for permission to do so would be better than just giving everyone money. Also, a right to access opportunity can't be lost, stolen, or squandered the way money can. Besides, if people get a UBI, landowners will just charge them that much more for permission to access shopping, education, medical care, public services and infrastructure, social and relationship opportunities, etc., even if they don't want to access employment or business opportunities.

A lot of people dislike to be the recipient of charity because it makes them feel like a massive loser. UBI will be more saleable if it is framed as a citizen's dividend or something like that.

Or compensation for the forcible removal of their rights to liberty and conversion of those rights into the private property of landowners and other privileged interests. But restoration of the individual rights to liberty that landowning and other privileges removed would be even more salable, IMO. No one likes paying taxes, and many would object to paying taxes to fund UBI for others, even if they also got it themselves. But people like being exempt from taxes, and don't mind others getting an exemption as long as they get the same exemption themselves.

]]>2019-05-17T19:08:19+01:002019-05-17T19:08:19+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176342&p=15005358#p15005358Torus34 wrote:Perhaps we could profitably partition the debate into a discussion of the comparative theoretical soundness of two [Ed.: or more,] economic theories

Theories are often based on factual assumptions that can be correct or incorrect, and might change over time. For example, Smith considered money to be precious metal specie coins issued by the Mint at a cost comparable to their face value, while today it is almost all electronic ledger entries created by private commercial banks at effectively zero cost. Big difference.

and a separate discussion of what economic 'system' is actually possible [Ed.: if any,] given our Federal legislative/administrative composition.

Sounds good. People who live in other countries probably don't know or care much what economic measures the Supremes might consider constitutional, which is also subject to change.

]]>2019-05-11T17:07:27+01:002019-05-11T17:07:27+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176342&p=15004222#p15004222Statistics: Posted by Torus34 — 11 May 2019 17:07
]]>2019-05-11T03:20:10+01:002019-05-11T03:20:10+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15004131#p15004131Truth To Power wrote:Evolution is precisely the emergence and extinction of species by genetic changes in INDIVIDUALS. It has nothing to do with "contributing" to a species's fitness.

And yet the document is called "The Origin of Species" and not "The Origin of Super Strong Individuals."

(Please read a few Sparks Notes on this document to improve your understanding of what Darwin meant by "strong" and by "selection.")

Genetic changes occur very slowly, and don't necessarily make an individual organism "stronger" from a survival point of view. These changes can't be induced or choreographed by people. We will never "select" for the correct criteria.

It is the natural elimination (by nature) of certain individuals that creates a strong species that will survive NATURE. See, Ak-47s won't help defend against bacteria, disease, or climate change. These will just help certain people to kill other people. Being able to kill other people (with technology) will not make your offspring more apt to survive disease or bacteria.

Humanity is facing extinction with all our nuclear bombs, Ak-47s and video games. None of this technology has made any of us stronger, and many of these technologies have permitted the "weak" to survive and eliminate "the stronger." Meanwhile, bacteria, which has no technology, is in no danger. It is (survival) stronger than mankind currently.

You are regurgitating the prevailing thinking on "evolution" that was popular in Europe BEFORE his theory became well known, and remained popular among the upper classes right up to this day.

Nope. They didn't even know about genes.

Before Darwin, "social theory" regarding evolution was that if rich people bred themselves according to their own social values, a super-species of upper-class James Bonds with spiderman powers would emerge.

Stop makin' $#!+ up.

Important was how the upper classes thought things like "big houses," "name-brand colleges," "trophy brides" and "strict sexual discipline" would be what would eventually create "a better human animal."

Yes, they believed in "breeding." Not that it would grant them supernatural powers.

Darwin's theory basically says that humans don't have a clue what they will need to survive, and that our religious behaviorism and magical technology, are just harmful distractions.

I don't care what you incorrectly imagine Darwin's theory to have been. I am talking about what evolution is in FACT.

Sure, one school-shooter might out-survive his peers (because of technology (ex. AK-47) and religion (ex. white supremacist), but according to Darwin, this kind of "survival" doesn't in any way contribute to our species ability to withstand future diseases, climates, and bacteria.

Evolution is precisely the emergence and extinction of species by genetic changes in INDIVIDUALS. It has nothing to do with "contributing" to a species's fitness.

Likewise, this kind of "angry, competitive fighting" risks making our species less cooperative, and thus, reducing our chances of long-term survival as a species to zero.

There is an equilibrium level of aggression that is most adaptive under a given set of conditions. Cooperation and aggression are both good to a point.

The rich thought that if they bred other humans (and themselves) the way that humans had created flowers and dogs, we'd be set. This is the fake "evolution" that you are defending, a kind of transformation that might more accurately be described as transmogrification, or perversion.

Nonsense. It has nothing to do with deliberate intervention. It's simply what has emerged because of what we have become.

Modern Economics follows the "breeding flowers" school of fake evolution, and contributes to societal breakdown and violence. These are not survival-oriented things.

More nonsense. Modern mainstream neoclassical economics is indeed fake, but it has nothing to do with evolution.

]]>2019-05-10T12:51:08+01:002019-05-10T12:51:08+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003969#p15003969SolarCross wrote:I can see why you think so but I would say playing identity politics is the game you are playing too. If we were boxing instead would you really be surprised if I were also to throw some punches too? If I engage with you I must play the same game. That said I think it remains a fair point that people such as yourself are happy to spend all day telling other people in your bubble all about how you can speak for the working class and assume you know what they want when in fact you don't really have anything to do with any of them. You are the flea who thinks he speaks for the dog.

Here's the difference: This *isn't* a game -- it's about the lives and wellbeing of workers all over the world, and as the vast majority of humanity. Economically, workers' own collective interests are *not* identity politics in any way because workers power is actually a *class interest*, and not a single-issue, identity-based grouping, although those are usually valid, too.

I'm not a political proselytizer -- the overwhelming bulk of my political activity these days is from my ongoing participation on these discussion boards.

If one recognizes that surplus labor value is being ripped-off from billions of workers every hour of the day, then it follows that all workers have a common, collective class interest in running production, and society, in our own best interests -- this is regardless of me, personally.

SolarCross wrote:I just want you to be clear that it is an imaginary system based on a faulty understanding of human nature, economics and history. If anything I am being generous in taking the time to point that out. But don't take my word for it, go to the pub meet some actual working class people and try to sell this idea to them. You won't find any working class people on revleft If you really mustn't leave the house try facebook because unlike revleft it actually has working class people actively posting there.

Well, thanks for the info, but you're following in the footsteps of TTP by making these blanket, baseless assertions while not-addressing the actual content at-hand, namely my model framework. My advice to *you* is to be less abstract and superficial, and to get *your* hands dirty with the material content of what proletarian interests objectively *are*.

SolarCross wrote:It is actual altruism to lend money to a stranger or work for a stranger and that is against human nature but getting paid incentivises and makes altruism tolerable. Civilisation depends on incentivised altruism to work. If you take away the incentive then you must resort either to wholesale slavery as the soviets did, which is the just darker incentive of terrorism, or watch everything fall apart completely.

You're *waffling* -- which *is* it, is investment / equity capital a matter of private *profit-making*, or is it somehow 'altruistic' with *no* ulterior motives of profit-making? (I really doubt it's the latter, because that would be *charity*, and different from investments for capital gains.)

You're mischaracterizing the past Stalinist regimes which were *far more* historically-progressive even though run by a separatist administrative bureaucracy with a paramount leader -- many of the workplaces *continued* to be mostly run in a bottom-up way, by the workers themselves, but there were also top-down dictates and production goals.

SolarCross wrote:HFT is just speculation done at the speed of light. It is an example of the kind of excellence produced by people chasing a profit. It is far more than is needed for making a market, in the 11th century speculators operated at far slower speeds and that did well enough, but why settle for good enough when excellent is possible?

And it begs no such question because HFT in no way suggests that people have lost in interest in getting paid for the sacrifices they make. HFT is not a contravention of the law of reciprocity, indeed it exemplifies it.

Hmmmm, you're missing the point -- speculative market activity is *not automatically* a good thing. The extraction of value from the markets through the HFT technique just means that algorithms are being used to open a 'back door' for paths of private aggrandizement.

The problem isn't the *speed* of the transactions, the problem is with the elitist edge in the marketplace due to *use* of these algorithms -- any private elitist advantage, like that of the more-conventional demographic-elitist racist sexist culture of the hegemonic group (white males), confers special advantages in the marketplace and *unbalances* the playing-field even more.

My point stands that the realm of capitalist exchange values can be 'gamed' with technology, as by those behind these HFT computer algorithms do, with elitist practices over a monumentally *uneven* playing-field -- with socialism this middle-layer of exchange values can be obliterated altogether, in favor of free-access and direct-distribution, with no exchanges needed anymore.

SolarCross wrote:Okay this must be some sick joke because the top 6 genocides in that list were commited by crazy socialist regimes and had absolutely nothing to do with "capitalism".

My indictment is of the world's *nation-state* system -- Stalinist regimes, like the ones you're referring to, were still encompassed within this global capitalist nation-state system, and must function in that mode. The classic example was the USSR, of course, which couldn't keep up with the Western arms race, and ultimately imploded.

SolarCross wrote:Capitalism operates with or without nation states. War will never go away, if you ever got your global totalitarian police state the wars would still continue they would all just be internal wars. Wars happen because people enjoy fighting and some problems can be solved with violence.

The existing international patchwork of nation-states is a historically-*emergent* property of capitalism that's still with us today. It's highly *unlikely* -- unimaginable, even -- that capitalism could continue to function *without* its landscape of competing nation-states.

I'm certainly not *calling* for a monolithic totalitarian capitalist world police state, or any other kind, and I agree that warfare *would* continue under capitalism because of the inherent nationalist goal to maximize a country's slice of the world's pie (market share).

Capitalist warfare happens because of the prevailing political consciousness of leaving things to the hands-off *market* mechanism, which leads competing claims to the same land, etc., to have to be solved through the means of last resort, meaning violence and war. Today there's increasing U.S. trade friction with China which is making an increasingly dangerous world for everyone.

You're -- predictably -- still trying to make global-societal dynamics sound *personal*, when they're not. Capitalist warfare is because of *capitalism*, not because of the implosion of Stalinist nation-states, 'enjoyment of fighting', or the 'might makes right' ethos.

SolarCross wrote:The sub-prime housing market was directly caused by the money counterfieting of the fiat money system. It had nothing to do with "hoarded" (saved) capital. It is however a flea bite, and the solution to a flea bite is not amputation. Some "cures" are far worse than the disease.

Okay, I'll spell this one out for you, as well -- when there's too much money (from whatever source) chasing too few market opportunities due to an economic environment of prevailing *deflation* / overvaluation, those with idle capital will be much more likely to invest in *riskier* assets (like subprime mortgages) even though the risk of default becomes greater. The term for this is 'casino capitalism' since nothing is actually getting *produced*, but rather capital owners become increasingly willing to make riskier 'bets' since there's not much else going on.

This failing financial system of 2008-2009 was only able to stabilize itself at the expense of public funds -- the U.S. government relented and used tax dollars to *bail out* many banks, but not all banks.

The housing bubble preceding the crisis was financed with mortgage-backed securities (MBSes) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which initially offered higher interest rates (i.e. better returns) than government securities, along with attractive risk ratings from rating agencies. While elements of the crisis first became more visible during 2007, several major financial institutions collapsed in September 2008, with significant disruption in the flow of credit to businesses and consumers and the onset of a severe global recession.[4]

]]>2019-05-09T14:57:34+01:002019-05-09T14:57:34+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003790#p15003790ckaihatsu wrote:Hmmmm, whether you realize it or not, you're just playing identity-politics here, without addressing the *substance* of the Marxist-type literature at all, like 'labor theory of value' (LTV), for example.

I can see why you think so but I would say playing identity politics is the game you are playing too. If we were boxing instead would you really be surprised if I were also to throw some punches too? If I engage with you I must play the same game. That said I think it remains a fair point that people such as yourself are happy to spend all day telling other people in your bubble all about how you can speak for the working class and assume you know what they want when in fact you don't really have anything to do with any of them. You are the flea who thinks he speaks for the dog.

ckaihatsu wrote:And this is just an unkind disparaging of the *model* *framework* I developed. You're being presumptuous, anyway.

I just want you to be clear that it is an imaginary system based on a faulty understanding of human nature, economics and history. If anything I am being generous in taking the time to point that out. But don't take my word for it, go to the pub meet some actual working class people and try to sell this idea to them. You won't find any working class people on revleft If you really mustn't leave the house try facebook because unlike revleft it actually has working class people actively posting there.

ckaihatsu wrote:There's no social altruism in the activity of profit-seeking and profit-making, both of which have nothing to do with a purported 'human nature', but have *everything* to do with the way that capitalism empirically functions.

It is actual altruism to lend money to a stranger or work for a stranger and that is against human nature but getting paid incentivises and makes altruism tolerable. Civilisation depends on incentivised altruism to work. If you take away the incentive then you must resort either to wholesale slavery as the soviets did, which is the just darker incentive of terrorism, or watch everything fall apart completely.

ckaihatsu wrote:I don't deny that computerization has enabled more-comprehensive use of real-world data, but when this technological trajectory just winds up feeding into 'high-frequency trading' -- making profits off of microsecond fluctuations in prices -- this result just begs the question of what exchange values are even *for* when they can instead be empirically *eliminated* in favor of a communist-type 'gift economy', *without requiring* exchange values.

HFT is just speculation done at the speed of light. It is an example of the kind of excellence produced by people chasing a profit. It is far more than is needed for making a market, in the 11th century speculators operated at far slower speeds and that did well enough, but why settle for good enough when excellent is possible?

And it begs no such question because HFT in no way suggests that people have lost in interest in getting paid for the sacrifices they make. HFT is not a contravention of the law of reciprocity, indeed it exemplifies it.

ckaihatsu wrote:Sure -- I'm not dismissive of the gains that capitalism has brought us to, but it's come at a *very* expensive *human* toll, mostly due to the goals of accompanying *imperialism*:

Okay this must be some sick joke because the top 6 genocides in that list were commited by crazy socialist regimes and had absolutely nothing to do with "capitalism".

ckaihatsu wrote:In other words, capitalism can only operate with the involvement of the nation-state, which provides centralization and standardization. Unfortunately the global patchwork of nation-states is a *competitive* landscape, and the shifting alliances act in a plate-tectonics kind of way, with the resulting friction causing all of the casualties of imperialist (and lesser) wars.

Capitalism operates with or without nation states. War will never go away, if you ever got your global totalitarian police state the wars would still continue they would all just be internal wars. Wars happen because people enjoy fighting and some problems can be solved with violence.

ckaihatsu wrote:I don't think your defense of market movements, through speculative activity, is *sufficient*, though -- we can look to the more recent example of the subprime housing market in 2007-2009 to see that destructive large-scale dynamics will inevitably manifest, with hoarded capital chasing after riskier market opportunities, with market-failures (crashes) resulting, all because of capitalism's dynamic of overproduction.

The sub-prime housing market was directly caused by the money counterfieting of the fiat money system. It had nothing to do with "hoarded" (saved) capital. It is however a flea bite, and the solution to a flea bite is not amputation. Some "cures" are far worse than the disease.

]]>2019-05-09T13:28:18+01:002019-05-09T13:28:18+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003784#p15003784SolarCross wrote:The "political literature" is written by anti-social unemployed people, either lumpenproles sponging of the working class through tax funded unemployment benefits or the untalented slug-a-bed scions of successful people living off of a trust fund. The cream of the literature was written by middle class criminal masterminds like Lenin, Trotsky and Mao. Not a working man anywhere to be seen.

Hmmmm, whether you realize it or not, you're just playing identity-politics here, without addressing the *substance* of the Marxist-type literature at all, like 'labor theory of value' (LTV), for example.

SolarCross wrote:It is an imaginary system because it exists and can only exist in your mind.

And this is just an unkind disparaging of the *model* *framework* I developed. You're being presumptuous, anyway.

SolarCross wrote:You don't understand what goes into assessing demand. Real world producers don't just look at price data they also do market research and consider unit sales. Real world producers have brought market analysis up to a fine art and they get very close results. The point of money is not solely as a data point for assessing demand, its main purpose is to be a convenient reward to incentivise altruistic behaviour. If you are not aware of that then you don't understand human nature very well.

There's no social altruism in the activity of profit-seeking and profit-making, both of which have nothing to do with a purported 'human nature', but have *everything* to do with the way that capitalism empirically functions.

I don't deny that computerization has enabled more-comprehensive use of real-world data, but when this technological trajectory just winds up feeding into 'high-frequency trading' -- making profits off of microsecond fluctuations in prices -- this result just begs the question of what exchange values are even *for* when they can instead be empirically *eliminated* in favor of a communist-type 'gift economy', *without requiring* exchange values.

SolarCross wrote:Speculation is much misunderstood even by competent people so I wouldn't expect you to get it. The vast majority of speculation helps smooth out prices because the speculators bid up low prices and sell down high prices in order to make a profit. A million trades happen this way every minute of every single day all year long today but no bubbles or crashes occur the vast majority of the time. When bubbles and crashes do happen it is usually because a bunch of amateur speculators jumped in to the market with more enthusiasm for easy money than skill. The famous tulip bubble of the 17th century was an example of that but it is atypical not normal. By analogy a million cars carry people safely to their chosen destination every day but that doesn't grab the attention the way a rare multi car pile up does. Accidents will happen because to err is human.

Sure -- I'm not dismissive of the gains that capitalism has brought us to, but it's come at a *very* expensive *human* toll, mostly due to the goals of accompanying *imperialism*:

In other words, capitalism can only operate with the involvement of the nation-state, which provides centralization and standardization. Unfortunately the global patchwork of nation-states is a *competitive* landscape, and the shifting alliances act in a plate-tectonics kind of way, with the resulting friction causing all of the casualties of imperialist (and lesser) wars.

I don't think your defense of market movements, through speculative activity, is *sufficient*, though -- we can look to the more recent example of the subprime housing market in 2007-2009 to see that destructive large-scale dynamics will inevitably manifest, with hoarded capital chasing after riskier market opportunities, with market-failures (crashes) resulting, all because of capitalism's dynamic of overproduction.

]]>2019-05-09T12:58:48+01:002019-05-09T12:58:48+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003779#p15003779ckaihatsu wrote:You're not correct -- much of what pertains to working class interests is in the political literature, which is also why I'm a *Marxist*, because Marxist revolutionary theory *does* speak to objective working class interests.

My 'labor credits framework' isn't just an 'imaginary system' -- it actually takes various empirical variables and dynamics into account, to propose the premise that it does, of mass-aggregation of daily individually prioritized demands, for the sake of providing society with real-world information about what people need and want. This survey-type information also serves to inform liberated-labor about project possibilities, something that capitalism *can't* do since it relies on the abstract intermediary of exchange-values, a crude method for ascertaining organic demand.

The "political literature" is written by anti-social unemployed people, either lumpenproles sponging of the working class through tax funded unemployment benefits or the untalented slug-a-bed scions of successful people living off of a trust fund. The cream of the literature was written by middle class criminal masterminds like Lenin, Trotsky and Mao. Not a working man anywhere to be seen.

It is an imaginary system because it exists and can only exist in your mind.

ckaihatsu wrote:The problem with money / currency / exchange-values is that it's merely a messy, crude *abstraction* of underlying values. One of the main problems occurs with the dynamic of *speculation*, in which initial prices fluctuate, sometimes wildly, due to buying and selling activity over the commodity itself, rather than reflecting real-world *input* values into the *production* of the commodity. The market pricing variable is expected to do far too much in this way, supposedly reflecting input valuations *and* the pricing balance between actual buying and selling prices, all in one price number.

This use of this intermediary abstracted exchange-values realm is far too antiquated for the world we currently live in, where commodity production could be done away with altogether, in favor of communism-type *free-access* and *direct-distribution* -- the communistic 'gift economy', in other words.

You don't understand what goes into assessing demand. Real world producers don't just look at price data they also do market research and consider unit sales. Real world producers have brought market analysis up to a fine art and they get very close results. The point of money is not solely as a data point for assessing demand, its main purpose is to be a convenient reward to incentivise altruistic behaviour. If you are not aware of that then you don't understand human nature very well.

Speculation is much misunderstood even by competent people so I wouldn't expect you to get it. The vast majority of speculation helps smooth out prices because the speculators bid up low prices and sell down high prices in order to make a profit. A million trades happen this way every minute of every single day all year long today but no bubbles or crashes occur the vast majority of the time. When bubbles and crashes do happen it is usually because a bunch of amateur speculators jumped in to the market with more enthusiasm for easy money than skill. The famous tulip bubble of the 17th century was an example of that but it is atypical not normal. By analogy a million cars carry people safely to their chosen destination every day but that doesn't grab the attention the way a rare multi car pile up does. Accidents will happen because to err is human.

]]>2019-05-09T12:14:48+01:002019-05-09T12:14:48+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003773#p15003773ckaihatsu wrote:That's funny, but also *condescending*.

You and others of your ilk constantly want to pretend that I just came along the other day and *invented* all this stuff *myself*, which, upon reflection, you'll see is not the case at all -- this class-consciousness stuff was already around long before I was born, and it happens to deal with not *me* personally, but with the state of affairs that the world happens to be in, since roughly the late 1700s (industrialization).

SolarCross wrote:No I am saying people of your ilk invent this stuff without a clue or care for what actual "working class" people want or what could work in the real world because you are not well acquainted with either. Hence why I say you should remedy that fault before inventing imaginary systems.

You're not correct -- much of what pertains to working class interests is in the political literature, which is also why I'm a *Marxist*, because Marxist revolutionary theory *does* speak to objective working class interests.

My 'labor credits framework' isn't just an 'imaginary system' -- it actually takes various empirical variables and dynamics into account, to propose the premise that it does, of mass-aggregation of daily individually prioritized demands, for the sake of providing society with real-world information about what people need and want. This survey-type information also serves to inform liberated-labor about project possibilities, something that capitalism *can't* do since it relies on the abstract intermediary of exchange-values, a crude method for ascertaining organic demand.

SolarCross wrote:Two questions:1. What do you imagine is wrong with "capitalist exchange values"?

The problem with money / currency / exchange-values is that it's merely a messy, crude *abstraction* of underlying values. One of the main problems occurs with the dynamic of *speculation*, in which initial prices fluctuate, sometimes wildly, due to buying and selling activity over the commodity itself, rather than reflecting real-world *input* values into the *production* of the commodity. The market pricing variable is expected to do far too much in this way, supposedly reflecting input valuations *and* the pricing balance between actual buying and selling prices, all in one price number.

This use of this intermediary abstracted exchange-values realm is far too antiquated for the world we currently live in, where commodity production could be done away with altogether, in favor of communism-type *free-access* and *direct-distribution* -- the communistic 'gift economy', in other words.

Is a tulip bulb really worth two lasts of wheat, four lasts of rye, four fat oxen, eight fat swine, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four tuns of beer, two tuns of butter, 1,000 lbs. of cheese, a complete bed, a suit of clothes, and a silver drinking cup -- ?

SolarCross wrote:2. How is "labor credits" not just another kind of money? (I am not in hurry to read your FAQ thing because my long experience of leftists is that they do not write very well and get everything wrong on purpose consequently my expectation is that your piece will be silly and tedious.) I may read it later if you can appear less obtuse and stupid than most leftists in this conversation.

Well you're certainly not encouraging any good will with your insulting characterizations, which provide a *disinclination* for me to respond.

Read the FAQ -- that's the best thing I can say. Do a search on the page for 'money' since I *have* addressed this point already there:

-> So labor credits are just *money*! Communism is supposed to be moneyless!

No, the labor credits are actually *not* money, because they don't *function* like money -- there's no commodity-production, no finance, and no M-C-M' cycle of exchange-use valuations for profit-making. The work done by liberated labor per hour can simply be *fully valuated* in relation to other kinds of work-role-efforts, through the use of circulating labor credits being paid-forward for each work role, typically specified in a finalized policy package. All of the output of goods and services, to supply chains and the end-user / consumer, have already been planned-out in advance, through the iterations of proposals and then finalized policy packages that specify all work roles required, per project, with pooled labor credits to *organize* the participation of available-and-willing liberated laborers themselves.

]]>2019-05-08T23:56:02+01:002019-05-08T23:56:02+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003677#p15003677Trying to describe Darwin's Evolution, Truth To Power wrote:It's about genes and the individuals who pass them on or fail to pass them on. That's all.

Nope.

You are regurgitating the prevailing thinking on "evolution" that was popular in Europe BEFORE his theory became well known, and remained popular among the upper classes right up to this day.

Before Darwin, "social theory" regarding evolution was that if rich people bred themselves according to their own social values, a super-species of upper-class James Bonds with spiderman powers would emerge.

Important was how the upper classes thought things like "big houses," "name-brand colleges," "trophy brides" and "strict sexual discipline" would be what would eventually create "a better human animal."

Darwin's theory basically says that humans don't have a clue what they will need to survive, and that our religious behaviorism and magical technology, are just harmful distractions.

Sure, one school-shooter might out-survive his peers (because of technology (ex. AK-47) and religion (ex. white supremacist), but according to Darwin, this kind of "survival" doesn't in any way contribute to our species ability to withstand future diseases, climates, and bacteria.

Likewise, this kind of "angry, competitive fighting" risks making our species less cooperative, and thus, reducing our chances of long-term survival as a species to zero.

The rich thought that if they bred other humans (and themselves) the way that humans had created flowers and dogs, we'd be set. This is the fake "evolution" that you are defending, a kind of transformation that might more accurately be described as transmogrification, or perversion.

Modern Economics follows the "breeding flowers" school of fake evolution, and contributes to societal breakdown and violence. These are not survival-oriented things.

It dehumanizes workers, turns us into cogs in a machine. It de-skills us too since it doesn't take much skill to repeat one small task all day. Capitalist class structure is a historical result of the division of labor process, or at least partially so. Industrial division of labor is what created the proletariat though right?

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. link

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Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement (Entfremdung) of people from aspects of their Gattungswesen ("species-essence") as a consequence of living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity.

The theoretical basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.

And, socialism would *have no* division of labor because there would be no elitist capitalist-like *state* to 'govern', or 'administrate' over all of it, contrary to your Stalinistic imaginings.

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ckaihatsu wrote:First off, you're *not* a socialist, so you have no *credentials* to speak on behalf of socialism, or on historical Stalinism.

Truth To Power wrote:Unlike you, I have never presumed to speak on behalf of socialism, only about socialism. As for "historical Stalinism," maybe you should go read a little history yourself, which will show you that socialists all over the world were rejoicing in Stalin's socialist "successes" for decades starting in the 1920s, and claiming them for socialism. Somehow, it was socialism until the horror and utter failure of it became undeniable. Then, magically, it had never been socialism at all, but "Stalinism" all along....

Well, at the time a degenerated workers state in Russia / USSR was *preferable* to Western imperialist hegemony (in geopolitics), despite Stalin's insufferability and deal-making with the West. A parallel could be made with Assad today, in Syria.

Of course revisionism is a bad thing, as you're pointing out.

Unfortunately you're unable to make the distinction between Communist-Manifesto socialism, and the historical accident of Stalinism as it happened, a kind of emergent political-material 'compromise' between the nascent soviet control of industrial production, and the Western imperialist invasions of the same, that hampered the soviets' long-term success.

Truth To Power wrote:Stop makin' $#!+ up. I'm just identifying the fact that alienation isn't one of them.

I'm *not* making anything up -- you *just* acknowledged the validity of Marx's 'alienation', as expressed in the term 'division of labor':

Truth To Power wrote:['Alienation'] [is] just division of labor.

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ckaihatsu wrote:you're blaming 'modern life and work' for people being alienated from the work that they do, when in fact the problem is the *social hierarchy* of classes, in which the ruling class preys on the labor efforts of the working class.

Truth To Power wrote:Garbage. It's high technology and the division of labor.

The 'division of labor' means that people who need a wage are made to do very circumscribed, repetitive tasks as a small part of an overall assembly line of production. The class hierarchy means that *others* benefit by *not* having to do those menial, repetitive work roles for the sake of their own life and living -- the privileged ownership elite.

Maybe you don't want to use the term 'preying', but that's what it *is*, empirically, regardless -- privileged elites are favored under capitalism with social *control* over what gets produced, according to the political commands of elitist wealth ownership.

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ckaihatsu wrote:The *timeline* of class society doesn't matter -- it could be feudal lords over serfs, slavemasters over slaves, the aristocracy over governments, or Silicon Valley over our present-day use of computer technologies. What all of these scenarios have in common is that technology is *incidental* to the social relations of dominance by ownership over labor.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong again. You still refuse to know the difference between dominance enforced by legally taking away others' rights and mere status achieved by being more productive.

Okay, so now you're relenting and recognizing the class privilege and political hegemony of the (legalistic) social *superstructure*.

But you're -- ironically -- *ignoring* the privilege of production-goods / technological *ownership*, as measured by the yardstick of 'productivity'.

*Of course* I know the difference between the power of the state and the benefits of technological ownership, particularly that of the means of mass industrial production. What *you're* overlooking is that these two material positions in society are actually *interdependent*, symbiotic, and mutually self-reinforcing. Who controls the state under capitalism? The bourgeoisie. And *why* is this? Because of the bourgeoisie's ownership of the means of mass industrial production, which confers the legal right to expropriate surplus labor value from the workers employed by that wealth ownership, through the production process.

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ckaihatsu wrote:So again you're *wrong* -- social relations *are* economic / material, leading to alienation, and are *not* due to century or decade, technology, or social psychology.

Truth To Power wrote:According to your fallacious Marxist definitions.

You're too hung-up on *terms*, to the point that you're ignoring the underlying *meanings*. You can adopt or dismiss whatever *terminology* you like, but you're still showing that you do understand the actual *content* involved, as with 'alienation = division-of-labor', or 'social relations [of production] = economics / control of the material world'.

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ckaihatsu wrote:Sure, no one can disagree with you *empirically* here, but you're only using an abstraction, off on a tangent, as usual -- the *issue* at-hand is whether Marxist definitions aim to confuse and obscure instead of clarifying and illuminating.

Truth To Power wrote:They definitely do, because they do not refer to empirically observable facts.

Incorrect, as you yourself have shown previously, with your understanding of Marxist meanings. (The robbery of workers' surplus labor value through the expropriation of their / our product, while being paid a lesser-value wage, than what the commodities themselves are sold for on the market.)

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ckaihatsu wrote:Since Marxist definitions are from the perspective of the *working class*,

Truth To Power wrote:Look, sonny, I don't presume to speak on behalf of socialism, and I will thank YOU -- and your lying idol Marx -- not to presume to speak on behalf of the working class, of which neither of you are members, clear?

You don't get to instruct on the content of what socialism is or is-not, and you don't get to instruct *me*, either.

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ckaihatsu wrote:*you* deride such as being 'confusing' and 'obscuring', since you're politically partisan to the interests of the *merchant class*

Truth To Power wrote:More blatant nonsense. There is no "merchant class."

Truth To Power wrote:You are makin' $#!+ up again. I have never ignored labor and you know it. I am merely willing to know the fact that labor is more productive when the owner of producer goods contributes them to the production process.

Again, there's no 'contribution' of anything on the part of capital ownership because the capitalist production process benefits ownership by adding expropriated labor-value to the initial assemblage of materials (production goods and raw materials).

The term that's appropriate here is capitalist *exploitation* of workers and their surplus labor value.

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ckaihatsu wrote:Recall that you once *admitted* this -- that the price of the product sold *has* to be greater than the wage paid to the worker for *producing* it, otherwise there's no point in private ownership of the productive process under capitalism:

Truth To Power wrote:No. As the quote makes clear, I stated that there was no point in production if the value produced was no greater than the value of labor consumed in the process.

Correct -- that's what I just said.

This *discrepancy* between what labor's products are worth on the market when sold, and the value of the *wage* paid for those products, equals *exploitation* of labor because workers are not getting the full value of what the products of their labor are actually *worth* on the market.

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Truth To Power wrote:That is one reason socialism is stupid garbage: it has no way to determine if production is worthwhile or wasteful.

This is an incorrect characterization -- under socialism determinations would be made *consciously* and *qualitatively*, instead of being bound to capitalist commodity values that take-place *unconsciously* and *quantitatively* (according to the realm of exchange-values). Some call this 'economic democracy', meaning that *material* matters could be collectively determined, as well as any socio-political matters, without relying on any kind of specialist substitutionist bureaucratic administration.

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ckaihatsu wrote:So here you acknowledge that labor inputs *value* into the final commodity, and that that labor is not paid the full market value ('pricing') from the sale of the product produced by that labor.

Truth To Power wrote:Right, because that labor is not the only input. There are also natural resources, which must be paid for out of production if they are to be allocated efficiently, and the fruits of PREVIOUS labor, which the owner of producer goods contributes to the production process.

Natural resources are *free* to the capitalist, through the production process, as enabled by bourgeois governments, and 'dead labor' has already been claimed as private property by the capitalist -- so these two categories that you've mentioned are not really *significant* costs to the capitalist, mostly due to the stealing of surplus labor value from all workers employed. And again, 'contribution' is an inaccurate term to use because the benefits of production go right back to the capitalist owner -- nothing is 'contributed' to anyone.

ckaihatsu wrote:This discrepancy can be called -- in Marxist terms -- 'exploitation'. The worker is ripped-off, in material terms, for every hour of labor, which is a type of *alienation* in economic / material terms.

Truth To Power wrote:No, that's just an outright fabrication on your part. Providing workers with opportunity they would not otherwise have does not and cannot rip them off.

You're being *presumptuous*, though -- employment at this-or-that workplace isn't an 'opportunity' to the worker, it's a *necessity* for the biological and social needs of life and living, for the individual.

You've already acknowledged that there's a discrepancy between what a labor-product is sold for on the market, and the lesser value of the wage paid-for to *produce* that commodity -- this discrepancy *equals* exploitation of labor-value.

What stops workers from declining this-or-that job offer is the reality that the worker has to have money to *purchase* the means of life and living, like food and housing, etc. This, then, is social *coercion* because the worker has no options outside of the capitalist system of buying and selling with which to procure material necessities.

Truth To Power wrote:Oh, wait a minute, that's right: LANDOWNERS stripped them of their liberty to support themselves any other way.

The problem with this line of yours, that *separates* (rentier-type) land ownership, from (equity-type) capital investments into the production of commodities, is that you're failing to see that these both are all *commodities*, whether land or factory / equity ownership.

Yes, capitalists *have* stripped workers of their 'liberty' -- if you like -- to support themselves / ourselves in any self-sufficient manner. Commodities for biological and social life *must* be procured by the workers through selling the only thing one has: the ability to work, or 'labor power'.

Truth To Power wrote:Socialism consists in blaming factory owners for what landowners do to workers; capitalism consists in blaming the workers for it.

There's not even any private property (ownership) under socialism, so you're just blatantly *misrepresenting* socialism, as usual.

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ckaihatsu wrote:*You're* the one making assertions without any underlying evidence, and without providing any reasoning, like 'why' or 'how'.

Truth To Power wrote:Everyone reading this knows that is false, including you. I have identified the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality. You just refuse to know them, because you have already realized that they prove your beliefs are false and evil.

You're not addressing what I've said. I don't agree with what you're saying because you're just side-stepping the issues I've raised, and you're continuing to mischaracterize my politics.

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ckaihatsu wrote:This is *yet another* baseless contention from you -- here you are, on a *discussion* board, but you're preferring to favor sounding like some kind of authoritative 'expert', while unable to make the sale because you're not providing any objective basis for your facile claims.

Truth To Power wrote:I have identified the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality. And you know it.

No, I don't agree. You *suck* at describing objective physical reality because all you do is make baseless opinions. Such isn't welcome or accepted by me because I fundamentally don't agree with your propertarian political views.

Truth To Power wrote:False. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production -- land and producer goods -- and I have stated that land cannot rightly be private property. While there are many other sources of privilege and injustice in modern finance capitalism, it is private ownership of land that is the indelible injustice inherent in all capitalism.

Nope -- you can't arbitrarily *separate* rentier-type capital (assets) ownership from equity-type capital (investments) ownership, because capitalism is all about creating a *surplus* in capital / exchange-value valuations, through the expropriation of workers' surplus labor value.

Not all profits can always be continuously perfectly re-invested into new equity vehicles -- at some point some capital is going to need to be dormant, at which point it becomes *rentier*-type capital, like real estate values, for example.

Land itself is *not* economically productive, because it's not treated as equity values -- it's a real-estate, rentier-type *asset* that can command interest and rent payments, which is *not* productive activity. It's *parasitic*, the way the ruling class was during feudalism.

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ckaihatsu wrote:This is more ideological propaganda on your part -- you situate 'productivity' as being the machinations of elitist capitalist ownership over mass-industrially-productive private property (factories), while it's the *workers* who actually have to work on the machines, to produce finished products, while being materially *exploited*.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong. They don't "have to" work on the machines, and if they are being exploited by factory owners, it is only because landowners have forcibly deprived them of their bargaining power. There is nothing inherently exploitative in a consensual agreement to mutual benefit such as selling one's labor for wages.

But you're missing the fact that the 'playing field' isn't level -- workers and employers do *not* have equal power at the bargaining table, as you're implying. The owner of capital can *live off* of capital, but the worker, *without* capital, cannot. Workers only have their own potential to work -- labor power -- which they are obliged to sell to the employer for the sake of a wage, for the sake of procuring the necessary commodities for consumption (food, housing, etc.), for the sake of life and living.

And I've already explained how capitalist exploitation of labor power operates, which you yourself have already acknowledged.

---

Truth To Power wrote:Again, consider buying a loaf of bread from a bakery. No one is being exploited. Both parties gain from the trade. But if the local mafia stop customers from dealing with a rival bakery that didn't pay them protection money, then the first baker will raise his prices to balance supply and demand. To a socialist fool who doesn't know any economics, this looks like the baker is exploiting his customers by overcharging them; but he is actually just responding to market conditions. It's the mafia that is causing people to pay too much for bread, by removing their access to alternatives.

This is your own strawman-type construction because I haven't been discussing any purported "exploitation" of the *consumer*, but rather the implicit exploitation of the *laborer* within the capitalist productive process. This is 'apples-and-oranges' on your part.

---

Truth To Power wrote:That's also what the landowner, but not the factory owner, has done to the worker. Socialist fools who don't understand any economics think the baker is exploiting his customers when all he is doing is providing them with bread on mutually agreeable terms.

Strawman.

And you think that the markets automatically provide a perfectly level playing-ground, which is *not* the case.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:'Success' to you is this ruling class dominance over the social-productive process,

Truth To Power wrote:Nonsense and gibberish. Success is earning the just reward of superior productive contribution, which has nothing to do with class or dominance, and the productive process is immutably private.

You're ignoring / side-stepping the role of the *state*, which *favors* ruling-class interests over the interests of the *working* class. You're also unable to address the emergence of *monopolies* / oligopolies, which confer special advantages due to the lionizing of market-share.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:through the ownership of private property, including the capitalist state's use of violence to *enforce* these class relations.

Truth To Power wrote:There is no violence involved in the producer having property in his product. The violence is introduced by socialists taking it from him.

Just look at Venezuela today, which is beset by U.S. imperialism's *sanctions* on Venezuela's trade relations. This is the power of the bourgeois imperialist *state*, which overwhelmingly affects economic matters and dynamics, while you seem to think that the state is somehow neutral and almost inert.

That's not a quality of moral-type 'merit' -- it's the objective material interest of capital towards *profit-making*, as established by the social relations of capitalism itself. And there's no 'contribution' involved on the part of private-property, since its own private interests are for self-aggrandizement.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:and 'material success' only comes from this productive monopolization over the heads of the working class.

Truth To Power wrote:No, it comes from earning more by contributing more.

Bullshit. We've been over this subject matter already. You still haven't provided any proof or reasoning for your reckless opinionating.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:Since you *do* acknowledge privileged parasitism, you'd do well to *emphasize* this empirical reality,

Truth To Power wrote:I do. Very much.

No, you don't. You seem to think that *equity* capital is angelic, while rentier-type capital is to be disdained in particular, but then at other times you *validate* rentier-type capital anyway, showing the inconsistency and unseriousness of your politics.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:and the objective interests of the working class for the collective *seizing* and *controlling* of all socially productive machinery.

Truth To Power wrote:That is a blatant and absurd non sequitur such as one expects from socialists. Why would I advocate worker seizure and control of producer goods when their current ownership has no relation to privilege or parasitism?

It's *not* a non-sequitur, and you *don't* have to advocate worker seizure and control of producer goods. It's clear which side you're on.

Also, you *just said* that capitalist-type privileged ownership is parasitic:

ckaihatsu wrote:Since you *do* acknowledge privileged parasitism, you'd do well to *emphasize* this empirical reality,

Truth To Power wrote:I do. Very much.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:'Opportunity' is an overstatement since *all* working-class people are empirically *under duress* to sell their labor power as a commodity to this-or-that private property owner, for a necessarily exploitative wage.

Truth To Power wrote:<sigh> Simple question: is the baker who inadvertently benefits from the mafia's removal of a rival offering customers an opportunity to buy bread that they would otherwise have to do without, or not?

You're talking about the *protection racket*, which the United States has mastered internationally -- the protection racket is at the core of the international acceptance of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency.

Competition within the ownership class, as depicted in this scenario of yours, is just a knock-on effect of capitalism and its inherent carving-up of the material world into balkanized national private-property interests. The greatest examples are World War I and World War II.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:There's no 'contribution' when all financial investments into the productive process are done *strategically* for the sake of making private profits.

Truth To Power wrote:That's just obviously and indisputably false. When the baker buys a new oven to increase production, relieving the mafia-imposed scarcity that has raised prices, with the result that PRICES ARE LOWER for his customers, but PRODUCTION AND HIS PROFITS are HIGHER, he is making a contribution to production. Because socialists have to refuse to know all facts of economics to preserve their false and evil belief system, they refuse to know the fact that the baker's higher profit is EARNED by providing unambiguous benefits for his customers.

Now you're erroneously conflating socialists with being members of a mafia -- socialists do not participate in the furtherance of capitalist social relations except under duress since there's no other system outside of commodities to turn to.

You sound like fucking Ronald Reagan with your 'evil empire' rhetoric, even though no Stalinist nation-states even *exist* anymore. It's 2019, not the redbaiting 1950s.

And private ownership doesn't earn *shit* -- it expropriates the labor-power of workers in the furtherance of its own private aims.

Truth To Power wrote:I have to earn a living, so I don't have time to respond to all your repetitive nonsense, which consists almost exclusively of strawman fallacies, nonsensical Marxist boilerplate, and refusals to know indisputable facts.

But you can't even *address* my points -- you twist-and-turn to *avoid* responding in kind.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:This reveals *much* about your own viewpoint and worldview -- you're a *biological determinist*, and now you've projected this worldview into *cultural* human development.

Truth To Power wrote:I'm a biological realist because unlike you, I am willing to know facts of objective physical reality. Free will vs determinism is a pseudo-issue.

Nope -- by thinking that we create human culture according to our genetics, you're implicitly positing a kind of genetic / biological *predestination*, since you're not including *cognitive functioning* within the individual's process of everyday decision-making.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:By this premise you're stuck in a kind of 'genetic predestination' -- since society is allegedly 'based on our genes', and, according to you, based on the process of natural selection, there's no space left for the exercise of one's own *free will*, since all of our personhood and decision-making is already pre-determined *genetically*.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're again imputing your own opinions onto socialism, which is *inappropriate* since you ideologically defend capitalist exchange-relations, or 'commodity production'.

Truth To Power wrote:Try to remember the definition of capitalism. It is ONLY about OWNERSHIP, not markets, exchange, production, or anything else.

Bullshit.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:You're missing that social values like 'power', are a function of the society's *productive relations* -- class --

Truth To Power wrote:Class is based on ownership, not productive relations.

Ownership *is* a productive relation, since under capitalism only private-property ownership is legitimized with the right to exploit the labor power of the working class.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:and with the mass-conscious *overthrow* of the class divide there will be an opening for *other* productive relations and values to emerge, ones based on a new reality of *material abundance* instead of capitalism's artificial scarcity, and of full social *cooperation* instead of class-based hierarchical *rule*.

Truth To Power wrote:See? Nonsensical Marxist boilerplate. Sorry, but I'm not a fan of replacing capitalism's artificial scarcity of natural resources -- which are all still there -- with socialism's much more harmful artificial scarcity of producer and thus consumer goods, which are NOT still there.

You don't understand what capitalism's 'artificial scarcity' even *is* -- and, you're just *presuming* to know how a potential future 'socialism' would operate, without providing any reasoning. It's just baseless opinionating on your part, sorry.

Artificial scarcity is the scarcity of items that exists even though either the technology for production or the sharing capacity exists to create a theoretically limitless abundance or at least a greater quantity of production than currently exists. The most common causes are monopoly pricing structures, such as those enabled by laws that restrict competition or by high fixed costs in a particular marketplace. The inefficiency associated with artificial scarcity is formally known as a deadweight loss.

Background

In a capitalist system, an enterprise is judged to be successful and efficient if it is profitable. To obtain maximum profits, producers may be restricting production rather than ensuring the maximum utilisation of resources. This strategy of restricting production by firms in order to obtain profits in a capitalist system or mixed economy is known as creating artificial scarcity.[1]

Artificial scarcity essentially describes situations where the producers or owners of a good restrict its availability to others beyond what is strictly necessary. Ideas and information are prime examples of unnecessarily scarce products given artificial scarcity [...]

Economic actions that create artificial scarcity

Cartels, monopolies and/or rentier capitalismCopyright, when used to disallow copying or disallow access to sources. Proprietary software is an example. Copyleft software is a counterexample (where Copyright is used to guarantee the right to copy the object and access source code).PatentThe Agricultural Adjustment ActHoarding, including cornering the marketDeliberate destructionPaywalls[3]

]]>2019-05-08T14:06:26+01:002019-05-08T14:06:26+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003581#p15003581SolarCross wrote:No I am saying people of your ilk invent this stuff without a clue or care for what actual "working class" people want or what could work in the real world because you are not well acquainted with either. Hence why I say you should remedy that fault before inventing imaginary systems.

I don't understand how you don't recognize this as fluff. You didn't even acknowledge @ckaihatsu's point, you just repeated what you said with an even more presumptuous slant. Snarky attitude doesn't make up for lack of clear thinking, or for lack of willingness to address what people are saying. This is just careerist gibberish.

]]>2019-05-08T12:55:29+01:002019-05-08T12:55:29+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003578#p15003578ckaihatsu wrote:That's funny, but also *condescending*.

You and others of your ilk constantly want to pretend that I just came along the other day and *invented* all this stuff *myself*, which, upon reflection, you'll see is not the case at all -- this class-consciousness stuff was already around long before I was born, and it happens to deal with not *me* personally, but with the state of affairs that the world happens to be in, since roughly the late 1700s (industrialization).

No I am saying people of your ilk invent this stuff without a clue or care for what actual "working class" people want or what could work in the real world because you are not well acquainted with either. Hence why I say you should remedy that fault before inventing imaginary systems.

ckaihatsu wrote:Well, this latter part is true, anyway -- yes, some people's politics can't fathom a world without exchange values, so they just posit 'barter' in the place of currency, leading to implicit exchange values and capitalism all over again, just at more-localized, balkanized scales.

I think this is a major shortcoming of anarchism, for example, in that it doesn't have a sufficient model for post-capitalist material economics. How are various kinds of post-commodity social production to be considered in relation to one another, and *qualitatively* valued, for respective prioritizations of implementation, without resorting to (capitalist) exchange values to fill in the gaps from one geographical location to the next?

My own answer is the 'labor credits framework' that I created and linked to earlier:

Two questions:1. What do you imagine is wrong with "capitalist exchange values"?

2. How is "labor credits" not just another kind of money? (I am not in hurry to read your FAQ thing because my long experience of leftists is that they do not write very well and get everything wrong on purpose consequently my expectation is that your piece will be silly and tedious.) I may read it later if you can appear less obtuse and stupid than most leftists in this conversation.

]]>2019-05-08T12:17:51+01:002019-05-08T12:17:51+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003577#p15003577SolarCross wrote:@ckaihatsu I think you should actually leave the house now and again and go and meet some real "working class" people before you assume you know what they want.

That's funny, but also *condescending*.

You and others of your ilk constantly want to pretend that I just came along the other day and *invented* all this stuff *myself*, which, upon reflection, you'll see is not the case at all -- this class-consciousness stuff was already around long before I was born, and it happens to deal with not *me* personally, but with the state of affairs that the world happens to be in, since roughly the late 1700s (industrialization).

SolarCross wrote:If *you* don't "substitutionally determine" what they do then they will just reinvent capitalism.

Well, this latter part is true, anyway -- yes, some people's politics can't fathom a world without exchange values, so they just posit 'barter' in the place of currency, leading to implicit exchange values and capitalism all over again, just at more-localized, balkanized scales.

I think this is a major shortcoming of anarchism, for example, in that it doesn't have a sufficient model for post-capitalist material economics. How are various kinds of post-commodity social production to be considered in relation to one another, and *qualitatively* valued, for respective prioritizations of implementation, without resorting to (capitalist) exchange values to fill in the gaps from one geographical location to the next?

My own answer is the 'labor credits framework' that I created and linked to earlier:

]]>2019-05-08T04:44:18+01:002019-05-08T04:44:18+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003516#p15003516Truth To Power wrote:Alienation is a psychological or social phenomenon, not an economic one.

Dividing the "economic" from the "psychological" or "social" is missing the point. Marx believed in the dependence of social conditions on the economic mode of production:

Marx, in The German Ideology, wrote:This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.

Insofar as our social conditions are determined by the way in which we reproduce our material existence, alienation is as much a social phenomenon as it is an economic phenomenon. If you want to attack the material basis of Marx's theory of alienation, it is not sufficient to identify alienation as "social" in contrast to "economic." You'd be better off arguing that social conditions are not the product of economic, or material, conditions; that alienation has nothing to do with the way individuals reproduce their existence day by day. This is difficult. In fact, you argue the opposite later on when you identify alienation with "improved technology," which is material.

Truth to Power wrote:To the extent that modern life and work are alienating because they are unnatural, and quite unlike the life and work of our hunter-gatherer forebears, that is a matter of improved technology, not economic system, and would not be -- and hasn't been -- any different under socialism.

Vapid. Humans use tools and technology to shape their environment, and this has never not been the case. The adaptation of technology is not in and of itself an alienating activity, unless you're ready and willing to explain to me how spearing down a mammoth is somehow alienating.

Alienation does not inhere in the level of technological development. It is produced through the separation of the worker from their labor, through their labor's belonging to somebody else, i.e. to the capitalist.

Truth to Power wrote:Wrong again. Definitions that are intended to obscure rather than clarify are dishonest and worthless.

You have no way of proving that Marxist definitions are intended to obscure rather than clarify. You refuse to give a generous reading because doing so would make your opinions seem less than self-sufficient. You don't want to be proven wrong.

Truth to Power wrote:Wrong again. If definitions don't make sense, or don't match useful concepts, that refutes them.

This isn't wrong, but you haven't even remotely shown how Marxist definitions don't make sense. The most you've done is project onto them your own bad faith, without any reasoning beyond "this is garbage." I doubt you understand Marxist alienation, and I doubt you understand your own slipshod theory of alienation, either. It isn't very clear.

Truth to Power wrote:I can be accused of many things, but being unclear is not one of them.

-- alienation is an *economic* dynamic, one which separates the products of labor from the workers who created them, just like the Wikipedia article covers.

Garbage. That's just division of labor. Same under socialism.

First off, you're *not* a socialist, so you have no *credentials* to speak on behalf of socialism, or on historical Stalinism.

Unlike you, I have never presumed to speak on behalf of socialism, only about socialism. As for "historical Stalinism," maybe you should go read a little history yourself, which will show you that socialists all over the world were rejoicing in Stalin's socialist "successes" for decades starting in the 1920s, and claiming them for socialism. Somehow, it was socialism until the horror and utter failure of it became undeniable. Then, magically, it had never been socialism at all, but "Stalinism" all along....

Stop makin' $#!+ up. I'm just identifying the fact that alienation isn't one of them.

you're blaming 'modern life and work' for people being alienated from the work that they do, when in fact the problem is the *social hierarchy* of classes, in which the ruling class preys on the labor efforts of the working class.

Garbage. It's high technology and the division of labor.

The *timeline* of class society doesn't matter -- it could be feudal lords over serfs, slavemasters over slaves, the aristocracy over governments, or Silicon Valley over our present-day use of computer technologies. What all of these scenarios have in common is that technology is *incidental* to the social relations of dominance by ownership over labor.

Wrong again. You still refuse to know the difference between dominance enforced by legally taking away others' rights and mere status achieved by being more productive.

So again you're *wrong* -- social relations *are* economic / material, leading to alienation, and are *not* due to century or decade, technology, or social psychology.

According to your fallacious Marxist definitions.

Sure, no one can disagree with you *empirically* here, but you're only using an abstraction, off on a tangent, as usual -- the *issue* at-hand is whether Marxist definitions aim to confuse and obscure instead of clarifying and illuminating.

They definitely do, because they do not refer to empirically observable facts.

Since Marxist definitions are from the perspective of the *working class*,

Look, sonny, I don't presume to speak on behalf of socialism, and I will thank YOU -- and your lying idol Marx -- not to presume to speak on behalf of the working class, of which neither of you are members, clear?

*you* deride such as being 'confusing' and 'obscuring', since you're politically partisan to the interests of the *merchant class*

More blatant nonsense. There is no "merchant class."

and its quantitative economic scheme of 'pricing' (exchange values), while ignoring the actual human labor that *produced* such exchange values.

You are makin' $#!+ up again. I have never ignored labor and you know it. I am merely willing to know the fact that labor is more productive when the owner of producer goods contributes them to the production process.

Recall that you once *admitted* this -- that the price of the product sold *has* to be greater than the wage paid to the worker for *producing* it, otherwise there's no point in private ownership of the productive process under capitalism:

No. As the quote makes clear, I stated that there was no point in production if the value produced was no greater than the value of labor consumed in the process. That is one reason socialism is stupid garbage: it has no way to determine if production is worthwhile or wasteful.

So here you acknowledge that labor inputs *value* into the final commodity, and that that labor is not paid the full market value ('pricing') from the sale of the product produced by that labor.

Right, because that labor is not the only input. There are also natural resources, which must be paid for out of production if they are to be allocated efficiently, and the fruits of PREVIOUS labor, which the owner of producer goods contributes to the production process.

This discrepancy can be called -- in Marxist terms -- 'exploitation'. The worker is ripped-off, in material terms, for every hour of labor, which is a type of *alienation* in economic / material terms.

No, that's just an outright fabrication on your part. Providing workers with opportunity they would not otherwise have does not and cannot rip them off. What stops them from just declining the offer? Oh, wait a minute, that's right: LANDOWNERS stripped them of their liberty to support themselves any other way. Socialism consists in blaming factory owners for what landowners do to workers; capitalism consists in blaming the workers for it.

*You're* the one making assertions without any underlying evidence, and without providing any reasoning, like 'why' or 'how'.

Everyone reading this knows that is false, including you. I have identified the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality. You just refuse to know them, because you have already realized that they prove your beliefs are false and evil.

This is *yet another* baseless contention from you -- here you are, on a *discussion* board, but you're preferring to favor sounding like some kind of authoritative 'expert', while unable to make the sale because you're not providing any objective basis for your facile claims.

I have identified the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality. And you know it.

Bullshit -- you've repeatedly touted equity values and profit-making, which is all solidly proof of your ideological agreement with capitalism.

False. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production -- land and producer goods -- and I have stated that land cannot rightly be private property. While there are many other sources of privilege and injustice in modern finance capitalism, it is private ownership of land that is the indelible injustice inherent in all capitalism.

This is more ideological propaganda on your part -- you situate 'productivity' as being the machinations of elitist capitalist ownership over mass-industrially-productive private property (factories), while it's the *workers* who actually have to work on the machines, to produce finished products, while being materially *exploited*.

Wrong. They don't "have to" work on the machines, and if they are being exploited by factory owners, it is only because landowners have forcibly deprived them of their bargaining power. There is nothing inherently exploitative in a consensual agreement to mutual benefit such as selling one's labor for wages.

Again, consider buying a loaf of bread from a bakery. No one is being exploited. Both parties gain from the trade. But if the local mafia stop customers from dealing with a rival bakery that didn't pay them protection money, then the first baker will raise his prices to balance supply and demand. To a socialist fool who doesn't know any economics, this looks like the baker is exploiting his customers by overcharging them; but he is actually just responding to market conditions. It's the mafia that is causing people to pay too much for bread, by removing their access to alternatives. That's also what the landowner, but not the factory owner, has done to the worker. Socialist fools who don't understand any economics think the baker is exploiting his customers when all he is doing is providing them with bread on mutually agreeable terms.

'Success' to you is this ruling class dominance over the social-productive process,

Nonsense and gibberish. Success is earning the just reward of superior productive contribution, which has nothing to do with class or dominance, and the productive process is immutably private.

through the ownership of private property, including the capitalist state's use of violence to *enforce* these class relations.

There is no violence involved in the producer having property in his product. The violence is introduced by socialists taking it from him.

and 'material success' only comes from this productive monopolization over the heads of the working class.

No, it comes from earning more by contributing more.

Since you *do* acknowledge privileged parasitism, you'd do well to *emphasize* this empirical reality,

I do. Very much.

and the objective interests of the working class for the collective *seizing* and *controlling* of all socially productive machinery.

That is a blatant and absurd non sequitur such as one expects from socialists. Why would I advocate worker seizure and control of producer goods when their current ownership has no relation to privilege or parasitism?

'Opportunity' is an overstatement since *all* working-class people are empirically *under duress* to sell their labor power as a commodity to this-or-that private property owner, for a necessarily exploitative wage.

<sigh> Simple question: is the baker who inadvertently benefits from the mafia's removal of a rival offering customers an opportunity to buy bread that they would otherwise have to do without, or not?

There's no 'contribution' when all financial investments into the productive process are done *strategically* for the sake of making private profits.

That's just obviously and indisputably false. When the baker buys a new oven to increase production, relieving the mafia-imposed scarcity that has raised prices, with the result that PRICES ARE LOWER for his customers, but PRODUCTION AND HIS PROFITS are HIGHER, he is making a contribution to production. Because socialists have to refuse to know all facts of economics to preserve their false and evil belief system, they refuse to know the fact that the baker's higher profit is EARNED by providing unambiguous benefits for his customers.

You somehow think that you're *refuting* Marxism with your groundless claims when all you're really doing is pinning medals on yourself and buying trophies for yourself.

The above example of the baker just outright refutes all of Marxism, sorry.

Nope -- I've provided many points, including reasoning, that you're unable or unwilling to respond to.

I have to earn a living, so I don't have time to respond to all your repetitive nonsense, which consists almost exclusively of strawman fallacies, nonsensical Marxist boilerplate, and refusals to know indisputable facts.

This reveals *much* about your own viewpoint and worldview -- you're a *biological determinist*, and now you've projected this worldview into *cultural* human development.

I'm a biological realist because unlike you, I am willing to know facts of objective physical reality. Free will vs determinism is a pseudo-issue.

By this premise you're stuck in a kind of 'genetic predestination' -- since society is allegedly 'based on our genes', and, according to you, based on the process of natural selection, there's no space left for the exercise of one's own *free will*, since all of our personhood and decision-making is already pre-determined *genetically*.

Thank you for regurgitating the pseudo-issue.

You're again imputing your own opinions onto socialism, which is *inappropriate* since you ideologically defend capitalist exchange-relations, or 'commodity production'.

Try to remember the definition of capitalism. It is ONLY about OWNERSHIP, not markets, exchange, production, or anything else.

You're missing that social values like 'power', are a function of the society's *productive relations* -- class --

Class is based on ownership, not productive relations.

and with the mass-conscious *overthrow* of the class divide there will be an opening for *other* productive relations and values to emerge, ones based on a new reality of *material abundance* instead of capitalism's artificial scarcity, and of full social *cooperation* instead of class-based hierarchical *rule*.

See? Nonsensical Marxist boilerplate. Sorry, but I'm not a fan of replacing capitalism's artificial scarcity of natural resources -- which are all still there -- with socialism's much more harmful artificial scarcity of producer and thus consumer goods, which are NOT still there.

]]>2019-05-07T14:36:10+01:002019-05-07T14:36:10+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003391#p15003391ckaihatsu wrote:You're mixing-up economic paradigms -- a CEO is specific to *capitalism*, whereas a post-capitalist, socialist-type social order has no need for hierarchies *whatsoever* (arguably so, though, for the task of repressing the ruling class bourgeoisie during a global proletarian revolution).

The workers can collectively decide for themselves and wouldn't need *me* specifically (or anyone else) to substitutionally determine what they do or don't do.

Your scenario here is therefore *not realistic* and is too contrived / subjective to be taken seriously.

If *you* don't "substitutionally determine" what they do then they will just reinvent capitalism.

You'd be an hilariously bad CEO; the workers want money so you would give them exhaust pipes, the customers want exhaust pipes and so you would give them their money back.

You're mixing-up economic paradigms -- a CEO is specific to *capitalism*, whereas a post-capitalist, socialist-type social order has no need for hierarchies *whatsoever* (arguably so, though, for the task of repressing the ruling class bourgeoisie during a global proletarian revolution).

The workers can collectively decide for themselves and wouldn't need *me* specifically (or anyone else) to substitutionally determine what they do or don't do.

Your scenario here is therefore *not realistic* and is too contrived / subjective to be taken seriously.

]]>2019-05-07T14:32:19+01:002019-05-07T14:32:19+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003389#p15003389I think you should actually leave the house now and again and go and meet some real "working class" people before you assume you know what they want.

Under capitalism, however, organic demand *isn't enough* -- if the persons who need or want to be consumers don't have enough money to *purchase* life-critical goods (etc.), then the state will *enforce* the default personal scarcity from the goods (and services) that they may critically need. A good example here is Venezuela right now, where U.S. sanctions have denied 'free trade' to that country, thus further impoverishing many -- collective punishment -- despite Venezuelans not having done anything wrong to warrant this collective punishment through economic sanctions.

Workers are the ones who *make* things -- not the capitalists -- and so they should be able to control the products of their own labor, away from commodity production and exchange values, and instead for actual human need.

Yes, under capitalism we live in a money- / commodity-based economics, and so workers need money to purchase the necessities of life and living. If they could also control their own productive efforts, for material production, then they could collectively direct *where*, and *to who* these goods and services go, instead of being ripped-off by the bosses (private property owners).

So a worldwide socialist revolution is needed so that no section of humanity has to suffer while human-necessary goods and services are produced, possibly in overproduction (physical abundance), yet poorly distributed due to the lack of money in the possession of those who need, but can't afford, such goods and services.

Ultimately money would no longer even be socially *necessary* because, under capitalism, it's a commodity itself, and socialism enables free-access and direct-distribution to the products of self-collectivized, liberated labor.

I developed a framework model for a potential functioning of a post-capitalist, socialism- and communism-type economics and society, which is here:

]]>2019-05-07T14:23:38+01:002019-05-07T14:23:38+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003385#p15003385You'd be an hilariously bad CEO; the workers want money so you would give them exhaust pipes, the customers want exhaust pipes and so you would give them their money back.

]]>2019-05-07T13:54:24+01:002019-05-07T13:54:24+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003380#p15003380ckaihatsu wrote:You're obviously missing the point -- why *shouldn't* workers be able to keep the products of their own labor?

A ton of exhaust pipes or self-sealing stembolts are still *commodities*, and could be sold to buyers for *far more* than what the workers receive in wages to *produce* those commodities. All that the private property owner has brought to the table is the past products of past labor expended, like the factory building itself, known as 'dead labor'.

You seem to be trying to *convince* the worker that necessarily-exploitative wages should be seen as *sufficient* somehow, as adequate recompense for the ownership's taking of the workers' product of their / our labor.

We can simply look to what the hegemonic *owner* prefers to take -- it's the *finished* product, worth more on the market than the *lesser* value of the wage paid to the workers for the *production* of that commodity, whatever it happens to be.

The workers themselves don't want them, they want the money. The customers want the product.

]]>2019-05-07T13:50:16+01:002019-05-07T13:50:16+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003379#p15003379SolarCross wrote:That's retarded. No one goes to work being sad they didn't get to keep what they produced because they go to work to get money not the things they sell to get money. Imagine a factory worker crying because the factory managers paid him lovely lovely money instead of a ton of exhaust pipes or self-sealing stembolts.

You're obviously missing the point -- why *shouldn't* workers be able to keep the products of their own labor?

A ton of exhaust pipes or self-sealing stembolts are still *commodities*, and could be sold to buyers for *far more* than what the workers receive in wages to *produce* those commodities. All that the private property owner has brought to the table is the past products of past labor expended, like the factory building itself, known as 'dead labor'.

You seem to be trying to *convince* the worker that necessarily-exploitative wages should be seen as *sufficient* somehow, as adequate recompense for the ownership's taking of the workers' product of their / our labor.

We can simply look to what the hegemonic *owner* prefers to take -- it's the *finished* product, worth more on the market than the *lesser* value of the wage paid to the workers for the *production* of that commodity, whatever it happens to be.

]]>2019-05-07T13:34:10+01:002019-05-07T13:34:10+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003377#p15003377ckaihatsu wrote:Bullshit -- alienation is an *economic* dynamic, one which separates the products of labor from the workers who created them, just like the Wikipedia article covers.

That's retarded. No one goes to work being sad they didn't get to keep what they produced because they go to work to get money not the things they sell to get money. Imagine a factory worker crying because the factory managers paid him lovely lovely money instead of a ton of exhaust pipes or self-sealing stembolts.

]]>2019-05-07T13:17:51+01:002019-05-07T13:17:51+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003368#p15003368Truth To Power wrote:Alienation is a psychological or social phenomenon, not an economic one.

Bullshit -- alienation is an *economic* dynamic, one which separates the products of labor from the workers who created them, just like the Wikipedia article covers.

Truth To Power wrote:To the extent that modern life and work are alienating because they are unnatural, and quite unlike the life and work of our hunter-gatherer forebears, that is a matter of improved technology, not economic system, and would not be -- and hasn't been -- any different under socialism.

First off, you're *not* a socialist, so you have no *credentials* to speak on behalf of socialism, or on historical Stalinism.

It's funny that you're deliberately avoiding *economic* issues here on an *economics* thread -- you're blaming 'modern life and work' for people being alienated from the work that they do, when in fact the problem is the *social hierarchy* of classes, in which the ruling class preys on the labor efforts of the working class.

The *timeline* of class society doesn't matter -- it could be feudal lords over serfs, slavemasters over slaves, the aristocracy over governments, or Silicon Valley over our present-day use of computer technologies. What all of these scenarios have in common is that technology is *incidental* to the social relations of dominance by ownership over labor.

So again you're *wrong* -- social relations *are* economic / material, leading to alienation, and are *not* due to century or decade, technology, or social psychology.

Truth To Power wrote:All Marxist definitions are dishonest attempts to confuse and obscure rather than clarify and illuminate.

Justin_S wrote:Accusations of obscurity are a complaint, not a rebuttal.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong again. Definitions that are intended to obscure rather than clarify are dishonest and worthless.

Sure, no one can disagree with you *empirically* here, but you're only using an abstraction, off on a tangent, as usual -- the *issue* at-hand is whether Marxist definitions aim to confuse and obscure instead of clarifying and illuminating.

Since Marxist definitions are from the perspective of the *working class*, *you* deride such as being 'confusing' and 'obscuring', since you're politically partisan to the interests of the *merchant class* and its quantitative economic scheme of 'pricing' (exchange values), while ignoring the actual human labor that *produced* such exchange values.

Recall that you once *admitted* this -- that the price of the product sold *has* to be greater than the wage paid to the worker for *producing* it, otherwise there's no point in private ownership of the productive process under capitalism:

Truth To Power wrote:[If] the value of the product is not greater than the value of the labor that goes into it, it's a waste of time making it. There's no net gain. Duh.

So here you acknowledge that labor inputs *value* into the final commodity, and that that labor is not paid the full market value ('pricing') from the sale of the product produced by that labor. This discrepancy can be called -- in Marxist terms -- 'exploitation'. The worker is ripped-off, in material terms, for every hour of labor, which is a type of *alienation* in economic / material terms.

ckaihatsu wrote:This has no *meaning* -- all you're doing is being dismissive without saying *why* or *how*.

Truth To Power wrote:That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

*You're* the one making assertions without any underlying evidence, and without providing any reasoning, like 'why' or 'how'.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:Your dismissiveness is baseless

Truth To Power wrote:Nope. It's based on facts of economics and epistemology, and more importantly, willingness to know them. Marxism/socialism is based on refusal to know them.

This is *yet another* baseless contention from you -- here you are, on a *discussion* board, but you're preferring to favor sounding like some kind of authoritative 'expert', while unable to make the sale because you're not providing any objective basis for your facile claims.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:it's one thing to say 'I'm pro-capitalism',

Truth To Power wrote:I have stated repeatedly that I am not, and you know it. I am just even more anti-socialist than anti-capitalist.

Bullshit -- you've repeatedly touted equity values and profit-making, which is all solidly proof of your ideological agreement with capitalism.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:but it's another thing to then shit all over perspectives on social reality, like those from me, that are pro-working-class

Truth To Power wrote:Your perspectives are neither based on social reality nor pro-working class. They are merely anti-success. As we have seen in this thread, the socialist perspective resents the superior merit and consequent material success of the highly productive even more than the parasitism of the privileged.

This is more ideological propaganda on your part -- you situate 'productivity' as being the machinations of elitist capitalist ownership over mass-industrially-productive private property (factories), while it's the *workers* who actually have to work on the machines, to produce finished products, while being materially *exploited*.

'Success' to you is this ruling class dominance over the social-productive process, through the ownership of private property, including the capitalist state's use of violence to *enforce* these class relations. There's no 'merit' to private property, and 'material success' only comes from this productive monopolization over the heads of the working class.

Since you *do* acknowledge privileged parasitism, you'd do well to *emphasize* this empirical reality, and the objective interests of the working class for the collective *seizing* and *controlling* of all socially productive machinery.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:without your providing of any justification or reasoning for that dismissiveness.

Truth To Power wrote:No, I have stated exactly why Marxism is wrong, absurd, and worthy of nothing but dismissal: it refuses to know the fact that the factory owner makes a contribution to production by offering the worker access to opportunity -- means of production -- he would not otherwise have. Everyone who has read this thread has witnessed the absurd mental contortions you have resorted to to prevent yourself from knowing it.

'Opportunity' is an overstatement since *all* working-class people are empirically *under duress* to sell their labor power as a commodity to this-or-that private property owner, for a necessarily exploitative wage.

There's no 'contribution' when all financial investments into the productive process are done *strategically* for the sake of making private profits.

You somehow think that you're *refuting* Marxism with your groundless claims when all you're really doing is pinning medals on yourself and buying trophies for yourself. It's underwhelming.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:Your anti-Marxism is unwarranted since you can't do anything except opinionate.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong. I have identified the indisputable facts of objective physical reality that prove Marxism is objectively false. You have simply decided not to know such facts.

Nope -- I've provided many points, including reasoning, that you're unable or unwilling to respond to.

---

Truth To Power wrote:[W]e create our society based on our genes, so the reality our society creates is just as much a part of natural selection as anything else.

This reveals *much* about your own viewpoint and worldview -- you're a *biological determinist*, and now you've projected this worldview into *cultural* human development.

By this premise you're stuck in a kind of 'genetic predestination' -- since society is allegedly 'based on our genes', and, according to you, based on the process of natural selection, there's no space left for the exercise of one's own *free will*, since all of our personhood and decision-making is already pre-determined *genetically*. Good luck with that erroneous hypothesis.

Truth To Power wrote:[Our] species' survival will be endangered by certain technologies -- bioweapons, self-replicating nanotech, and superhuman artificial intelligence are candidates in the foreseeable future -- that really have very little to do with social practices or economics. People pursue power, and technology is power. That's true under any economic system.

You're again imputing your own opinions onto socialism, which is *inappropriate* since you ideologically defend capitalist exchange-relations, or 'commodity production'.

You're missing that social values like 'power', are a function of the society's *productive relations* -- class -- and with the mass-conscious *overthrow* of the class divide there will be an opening for *other* productive relations and values to emerge, ones based on a new reality of *material abundance* instead of capitalism's artificial scarcity, and of full social *cooperation* instead of class-based hierarchical *rule*.

]]>2019-05-06T20:27:05+01:002019-05-06T20:27:05+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003181#p15003181QatzelOk wrote:No one said there was.

Yes, actually, you did.

But this "survival" isn't necessary Darwinian evolution.

Sure it is.

Evolution is about A SPECIES being strong because of its genetic history and elimination of those who can't tolerate NATURAL conditions.

Nope. It's about genes and the individuals who pass them on or fail to pass them on. That's all.

If a serial killer opens fire at a rock concert and kills everyone else, this person is no "stronger" from an evolutionary perspective than the people he killed.

That depends on how may descendants he ultimately has compared to them.

In fact, some of the people he killed no doubt had better "survival" genetics than the killer, and were more "survival-minded" which is also part of Natural Selection.

A lot of evolution is of course just dumb luck, but there is no unambiguous way to separate luck from the effects of genetically inheritable fitness. One reason intelligence is so highly adaptive is that it enables one to better predict the vicissitudes of fortune.

On the other hand, if a naturally-occurring disease or climatic condition kills everyone except those with a specific genetic trait, then these survivors are part of evolution. But the minute humans start using technology to cheat at this natural reality, we being to pursue things that are NOT survival-oriented.

Nope. We create our society based on our genes, so the reality our society creates is just as much a part of natural selection as anything else.

We are there now. Our SUVS helps drivers survive frontal impacts, but will drive our species to extinction.

Such claims are absurd.

Is this a clear enough example for you to understand what actual "Evolution" is?

It's a clear enough example to prove you DON'T know what it is.

Or are you too locked into your own practices and ideology to understand it?

Your claim above was false and absurd. Learn it, or continue to talk nonsense on the subject permanently.

Most Westerners are still living in the 1700s when it comes to understanding Darwin.

Including you.

Evolution is about being "adaptable to the natural world."

Nope. It's only about which genes get passed on. Nothing else.

To be "adaptable to weapons and capitalism" is a disaster in that this kind of unnatural "killing" leads to the survival of the weakest and most dim-witted.

Only if you think you know better than reality what constitutes being weak and dim-witted.

Imagine the Capones killing everyone else in Chicago. And then all dying of hay-fever when spring comes.

Why would I waste my time on such obvious absurdities?

Nature doesn't care how strong you are with technology.

Yes, actually, it does.

Learning (and internalizing) our fake social practices (like Economics) leads you to practices that endanger the survival of our species.

Not really. Our species' survival will be endangered by certain technologies -- bioweapons, self-replicating nanotech, and superhuman artificial intelligence are candidates in the foreseeable future -- that really have very little to do with social practices or economics. People pursue power, and technology is power. That's true under any economic system.

]]>2019-05-06T20:10:35+01:002019-05-06T20:10:35+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003173#p15003173ckaihatsu wrote:This has no *meaning* -- all you're doing is being dismissive without saying *why* or *how*.

That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Your dismissiveness is baseless

Nope. It's based on facts of economics and epistemology, and more importantly, willingness to know them. Marxism/socialism is based on refusal to know them.

-- it's one thing to say 'I'm pro-capitalism',

I have stated repeatedly that I am not, and you know it. I am just even more anti-socialist than anti-capitalist.

but it's another thing to then shit all over perspectives on social reality, like those from me, that are pro-working-class

Your perspectives are neither based on social reality nor pro-working class. They are merely anti-success. As we have seen in this thread, the socialist perspective resents the superior merit and consequent material success of the highly productive even more than the parasitism of the privileged.

without your providing of any justification or reasoning for that dismissiveness.

No, I have stated exactly why Marxism is wrong, absurd, and worthy of nothing but dismissal: it refuses to know the fact that the factory owner makes a contribution to production by offering the worker access to opportunity -- means of production -- he would not otherwise have. Everyone who has read this thread has witnessed the absurd mental contortions you have resorted to to prevent yourself from knowing it.

Your anti-Marxism is unwarranted since you can't do anything except opinionate.

Wrong. I have identified the indisputable facts of objective physical reality that prove Marxism is objectively false. You have simply decided not to know such facts.

]]>2019-05-06T18:35:03+01:002019-05-06T18:35:03+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003140#p15003140But it isn't necessarily the case. It can even make you less anti-social, such as if you take the lessons to heart about the severe socio-economic issues effecting society.

On the other hand, learning environmentalism can make you downright homo-/sui-cidal, if we are honest about it (and I'm not really suggesting this result to be irrational, nor am I really rejecting environmentalism).

@QatzelOk , for example, is actually quite economics literate. He might want to deny this, or maybe not. Perhaps he's a professor of economics in Canada, who's sort of taking the piss in a way.

I don't really necessarily think so (but then, he could be a plumber, and my guess might be about as statistically odds-on, given how little I know him--or I could guess he's maybe a sheep farmer, and the odds might be a little higher, based on how well I've gotten to know him of late...). (Okay, now I'm taking the piss.)

Anyway, I'm a bit pissed (pissed in the British sense) so I think I'll pinch it off, but Qatz's economics is actually also economics. Not saying I totally agree with him or anything, but economics does indeed benefit in my view from diversity of opinion; yet often does really suffer from group think (not to mention the insidiousness of perspectives based on (upper-)class vested interests, etc.).

]]>2019-05-06T16:27:26+01:002019-05-06T16:27:26+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15003113#p15003113Justin_S wrote:Explain. Preferably you would provide your own theory of alienation, too.

Alienation is a psychological or social phenomenon, not an economic one. To the extent that modern life and work are alienating because they are unnatural, and quite unlike the life and work of our hunter-gatherer forebears, that is a matter of improved technology, not economic system, and would not be -- and hasn't been -- any different under socialism.

Accusations of obscurity are a complaint, not a rebuttal.

Wrong again. Definitions that are intended to obscure rather than clarify are dishonest and worthless.

Any trouble one encounters understanding Marxist definitions does not refute these definitions,

]]>2019-05-05T00:03:50+01:002019-05-05T00:03:50+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15002716#p15002716Truth To Power wrote:There is nothing fake about still being alive when your competitors are dead.

No one said there was. But this "survival" isn't necessary Darwinian evolution. Evolution is about A SPECIES being strong because of its genetic history and elimination of those who can't tolerate NATURAL conditions.

If a serial killer opens fire at a rock concert and kills everyone else, this person is no "stronger" from an evolutionary perspective than the people he killed. In fact, some of the people he killed no doubt had better "survival" genetics than the killer, and were more "survival-minded" which is also part of Natural Selection.

On the other hand, if a naturally-occurring disease or climatic condition kills everyone except those with a specific genetic trait, then these survivors are part of evolution. But the minute humans start using technology to cheat at this natural reality, we being to pursue things that are NOT survival-oriented.

We are there now. Our SUVS helps drivers survive frontal impacts, but will drive our species to extinction. Is this a clear enough example for you to understand what actual "Evolution" is? Or are you too locked into your own practices and ideology to understand it?

Most Westerners are still living in the 1700s when it comes to understanding Darwin.

Evolution is about being "adaptable to the natural world." To be "adaptable to weapons and capitalism" is a disaster in that this kind of unnatural "killing" leads to the survival of the weakest and most dim-witted.

Imagine the Capones killing everyone else in Chicago. And then all dying of hay-fever when spring comes.

Nature doesn't care how strong you are with technology.

Learning (and internalizing) our fake social practices (like Economics) leads you to practices that endanger the survival of our species.

]]>2019-05-04T11:52:58+01:002019-05-04T11:52:58+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15002617#p15002617Truth To Power wrote:Marx's theory of alienation is garbage.

This has no *meaning* -- all you're doing is being dismissive without saying *why* or *how*.

Truth To Power wrote:All Marxist definitions are dishonest attempts to confuse and obscure rather than clarify and illuminate.

QatzelOK was referring to alienation in the context of emptiness and misery, which are psychological, not economic.

<silly Marxist garbage snipped>

Your dismissiveness is baseless -- it's one thing to say 'I'm pro-capitalism', but it's another thing to then shit all over perspectives on social reality, like those from me, that are pro-working-class without your providing of any justification or reasoning for that dismissiveness.

Your anti-Marxism is unwarranted since you can't do anything except opinionate.

]]>2019-05-03T21:10:47+01:002019-05-03T21:10:47+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15002440#p15002440Truth To Power wrote:Marx's theory of alienation is garbage.

Explain. Preferably you would provide your own theory of alienation, too.

All Marxist definitions are dishonest attempts to confuse and obscure rather than clarify and illuminate.

Accusations of obscurity are a complaint, not a rebuttal. Any trouble one encounters understanding Marxist definitions does not refute these definitions, just as it would be in bad faith for me to accuse you of being unclear and then to use that accusation to argue against your points, without regard for their actual content.

Being selected based on fake criteria like your ability to be a psycho-bitch who kills everyone... is anti-evolution.

See? There is nothing fake about still being alive when your competitors are dead.

Weaker specimens (naturally weaker) can out-survive the strong, and this makes our entire species weaker and less survival-oriented.

Nope. Weaker specimens out-surviving the strong means the former are actually fitter. The fossil record is full of bigger, stronger, but extinct versions of modern species.

If weapons determine who lives and who dies, our species will become more and more unethical and dangerous to itself and others.

Maybe, maybe not. As our weapons have become more powerful, human societies have become less, not more, violent, and less, not more, concerned with other species. No modern human society is remotely as violent and unethical as ape societies.

Darwin's work emphatically leaves it up to NATURE (not techno-toys) to determine who lives and dies. NATURE is the definition of strong, not Smith and Wessen.

Nope. Darwin made it clear that survival and reproduction trump whatever you imagine nature defines as "strong." There is little doubt that modern humans are physically weaker than Neanderthals. But they are gone, and we are still here. Smith and Wesson is just one recent factor in that evolution.

]]>2019-05-03T20:03:57+01:002019-05-03T20:03:57+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15002405#p15002405ckaihatsu wrote:This isn't a *contradictory* point -- taking it as being true at face-value, it would mean that capitalist alienation would apply to ownership as well as workers.

Marx's theory of alienation is garbage.

Of course this isn't the real meaning, though, and TTP has a written record of sidestepping the Marxian definition, in favor of imputing a *psychological* definition.

All Marxist definitions are dishonest attempts to confuse and obscure rather than clarify and illuminate.

The *real* meaning of 'alienation', as applied to the worker, is an *economic* / material distinction:

QatzelOK was referring to alienation in the context of emptiness and misery, which are psychological, not economic.

]]>2019-05-03T12:21:21+01:002019-05-03T12:21:21+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15002330#p15002330QatzelOk wrote:Alienation and emptiness are human miseries that would not be available if our owners did not provide them.

Truth To Power wrote:No, emptiness and alienation are also experienced by the owners themselves, and in situations where ownership is irrelevant.

This isn't a *contradictory* point -- taking it as being true at face-value, it would mean that capitalist alienation would apply to ownership as well as workers.

Of course this isn't the real meaning, though, and TTP has a written record of sidestepping the Marxian definition, in favor of imputing a *psychological* definition.

The *real* meaning of 'alienation', as applied to the worker, is an *economic* / material distinction:

Being selected based on fake criteria like your ability to be a psycho-bitch who kills everyone... is anti-evolution. Weaker specimens (naturally weaker) can out-survive the strong, and this makes our entire species weaker and less survival-oriented.

If weapons determine who lives and who dies, our species will become more and more unethical and dangerous to itself and others.

Darwin's work emphatically leaves it up to NATURE (not techno-toys) to determine who lives and dies. NATURE is the definition of strong, not Smith and Wessen.

With your points taken, QO, I'd like to say that you probably *don't* want to go down this road of 'biological determinism' since human *culture* has far supplanted any kind of *genetic*-based determinism -- which happens to be the prevailing line of mainstream bourgeois science these days, unfortunately. (The hard sciences and the social sciences don't usually talk to each other, which is yet-another form of reductionist Western 'alienation', so-to-speak, or the ghettoization of subject areas.)

Humanity is at the stage of material production where it really *doesn't matter* who's strong and who's weak because society has the capability / means of providing *all* people with the materials for healthy, self-motivated lives, given varying starting-points per individual.

]]>2019-05-03T03:49:34+01:002019-05-03T03:49:34+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15002282#p15002282About people killing one another with weapons, Truth To Power wrote:Evolution does not care about kindness.

You don't know what evolution is. Natural Selection is evolution.

Being selected based on fake criteria like your ability to be a psycho-bitch who kills everyone... is anti-evolution. Weaker specimens (naturally weaker) can out-survive the strong, and this makes our entire species weaker and less survival-oriented.

If weapons determine who lives and who dies, our species will become more and more unethical and dangerous to itself and others.

Darwin's work emphatically leaves it up to NATURE (not techno-toys) to determine who lives and dies. NATURE is the definition of strong, not Smith and Wessen.

]]>2019-05-01T20:26:20+01:002019-05-01T20:26:20+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15002064#p15002064QatzelOk wrote:While what you have written is well put together and long on words, it doesn't in any way convince anyone that Learning Economics does NOT lead to anti-social behavior.

There's a difference between learning the facts of economics, which promotes positive social outcomes by relieving scarcity, and learning modern mainstream neoclassical economics, which promotes, rationalizes, and justifies anti-social behavior and the gratuitous, forcible infliction of scarcity on others to obtain unearned wealth.

You have said that technology helped mankind out of a cooling event, but you have not proven that without technology, that mankind wouldn't have made it out of that cooling event.

Whether humanity would have survived without technology is irrelevant: technology is what has driven our intellectual development into becoming human. Without it, we would be no more intelligent than chimps, because brains are biologically expensive, and there would be no compelling reason to have more brains than a chimp.

Only that certain humans didn't make it out alive, and therefore, you conclude, technologies are good

Technologies are incapable of being good or evil. They are just ways to enhance the power of our human faculties. People choose whether to use them for good or evil.

(even as we currently approach the destruction of our living earth).

That is a remote possibility but one that must be faced. As technology enhances human powers, its further development will inevitably be pursued. It cannot be stopped or even appreciably slowed by any human political intervention, any more than silly "biodiversity preservation" laws can stop evolution. It's true that a malevolent superhuman artificial intelligence (SAI) or out-of-control self-reproducing nanotechnology could indeed destroy all life on earth. But the notion that, e.g., burning fossil fuels as an industrial energy source could possibly have a large net negative impact on global climate, let alone imperil human survival, let alone destroy the biosphere altogether, is just silly, Chicken Little nonscience with no basis in empirical fact.

This demonstrates how you have learned to use your education to defend technologies and power, not to defend the quality of life or social relations.

False. See above. I merely have enough more and better education (and intellect) than you to understand why your fears of CO2 and technology are absurd and groundless.

So your texts are living proof that the OP position may be accurate.

It is accurate in the sense explained above. Those who study modern mainstream neoclassical economics become worse human beings.

"We learnt to defend power by always talking about it in glowing terms." Not of what you have provided is convincing of anything other than that you have bought into your own culture's values, and this includes Power-is-good, which means that social relations are not because power is used to dominate other people.

Please try to find a willingness to know the difference between the power to give and the power to take. Both socialists and capitalists pretend they are the same: socialists to justify taking the factory owner's power to give, and capitalists to justify giving landowners, banksters, and other privilege holders the power to take.

Perhaps the humans who died during the cooling period were all the kind people, killed by the more aggressive and fearful.

It's possible. Evolution does not care about kindness. It only rewards survival and reproduction, and those are therefore the ultimate measure of morality: everything else perishes. Among animals, this dynamic often results in behaviors we find appalling, like the new alpha male lion's infanticide of a fallen male's offspring. One primate ethologist said that such behavior made life in gibbon society, "a grisly existence I would not wish on my worst enemy." But remember: it is precisely technology that has made us more peaceful than our ancestors, by upping the stakes in violent conflict. The big, brutal bully has to think twice about throwing his weight around when even the 98-lb weakling is perfectly capable of sticking a spear through his chest. It may have taken two world wars to evolve a peaceful German, but it only took one to evolve a peaceful Japanese.

That would re-spin your positive version of the history of technology pretty well into the opposite narrative. And all of your other points were equally selective in their description.

Nope. I don't agree with your premise that niceness is a higher good than survival. Survival is the highest good because morality cannot be impractical, and everything but survival ends in extinction and consequent moral meaninglessness.

]]>2019-05-01T03:20:23+01:002019-05-01T03:20:23+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15001951#p15001951You have said that technology helped mankind out of a cooling event, but you have not proven that without technology, that mankind wouldn't have made it out of that cooling event. Only that certain humans didn't make it out alive, and therefore, you conclude, technologies are good (even as we currently approach the destruction of our living earth).

This demonstrates how you have learned to use your education to defend technologies and power, not to defend the quality of life or social relations.

So your texts are living proof that the OP position may be accurate.

"We learnt to defend power by always talking about it in glowing terms." Not of what you have provided is convincing of anything other than that you have bought into your own culture's values, and this includes Power-is-good, which means that social relations are not because power is used to dominate other people.

Perhaps the humans who died during the cooling period were all the kind people, killed by the more aggressive and fearful. That would re-spin your positive version of the history of technology pretty well into the opposite narrative. And all of your other points were equally selective in their description.

The alternative was always a higher death rate, especially for children. You are a socialist, so you think it is better for more children to die. Simple.

And now their worker bees are in the billions, and resources are drying up.

No, more and more resources are being made available. Google "Ehrlich Simon Wager" and start reading. The exception is natural fertility resources like fish stocks, but they are being depleted because they are NOT owned: it's the Tragedy of the Commons. The privately owned forests of the USA are in excellent condition because their owners want them to remain productive.

Withouut owners, humanity would have a lower population right now, and less technology. Thus, we would be much further away from extinction (the ultimate failure of a species).

Wrong again. Humanity actually came very, very close to extinction after the Lake Toba eruption 70Kya precisely BECAUSE we did not have technology to adapt to global cooling. In fact, our high intelligence relative to previous human species is probably mainly due to the intense selection pressure of that event: those who could not figure out ways to cope with radically cooler and drier climate -- especially surviving winter outside the tropics -- perished.

Oh please.

Sorry to identify facts that prove your beliefs are false and evil.

Our economy is so layered and connected and its mafias are so on top of social control, that banksters, means of production owners, and land owners all work together to ensure everyone else's servitude and poverty.

No, that's impossible, because unlike banksters and landowners, those who own producer goods have no legal power to deprive anyone of anything they would otherwise have. They can't make anyone any worse off. All they can do is reduce scarcity and increase abundance. By contrast, banksters are legally empowered to issue and charge interest on the money that people have to use to participate in the economy, while landowners are legally empowered to deprive others of their liberty to use natural resources. IP monopoly owners can deprive us of knowledge and ideas that would otherwise be in the public domain.

The means of production, of transportation, of opportunity, of legality... are all in the hands of an oligarchy (our owners) who herd normal people with violence and lies.

The only people who can be our owners are those who own our rights to liberty: landowners and other privilege holders. Landowners own our liberty rights to ACCESS transportation infrastructure, job opportunities at factories, etc. IP monopolists own our liberty rights to access and use knowledge, ideas, and culture that would be in the public domain if they had not been legally reprivatized. The factory owner, by contrast, can't stop us from making a living, only offer us an enhanced opportunity to do so. Landowners and IP monopolists can and do stop us from making a living unless we pay them full market value for PERMISSION to do so. Banksters are in a slightly different category, as they enrich themselves by being entitled to do something -- issue money -- that the rest of us are not allowed to do. But our dependence on banksters for money enables them to charge us interest on the money we have to use to access economic opportunity.

They have studied the important parts of "economics" very well.

More accurately, they have paid for the creation and hegemony of a phony and dishonest "economics" -- neoclassical economics -- that serves their narrow financial interests.

]]>2019-04-30T04:48:50+01:002019-04-30T04:48:50+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15001770#p15001770Truth To Power wrote:"Extinction"? What on earth do you incorrectly imagine you think you might be talking about? Technology -- i.e., the contribution of its owners -- has made possible the thousand-fold increase in human population of the past 10Ky.

Yes, they wanted more worker bees. And now their worker bees are in the billions, and resources are drying up. Withouut owners, humanity would have a lower population right now, and less technology. Thus, we would be much further away from extinction (the ultimate failure of a species).

Landowners and other privilege holders own our rights to liberty, which enables them to force us into servitude, not the owners of producer goods. You can just decline to deal with the owner of producer goods and you are no worse off. The landowner, by contrast, initiates use of force against you to deprive you of what you would otherwise have.

Oh please. Our economy is so layered and connected and its mafias are so on top of social control, that banksters, means of production owners, and land owners all work together to ensure everyone else's servitude and poverty. The means of production, of transportation, of opportunity, of legality... are all in the hands of an oligarchy (our owners) who herd normal people with violence and lies.

]]>2019-04-29T18:16:23+01:002019-04-29T18:16:23+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15001672#p15001672QatzelOk wrote:Yes, the all important owners.

Right. In the case of producer goods, they would not exist but for their owners. Land (natural resources) would.

Technology and behaviorism are contributions to our extinction that would not be available if our owners did not provide them.

"Extinction"? What on earth do you incorrectly imagine you think you might be talking about? Technology -- i.e., the contribution of its owners -- has made possible the thousand-fold increase in human population of the past 10Ky.

Dog-like servitude is a human condition that would not be available if our owners did not provide it.

Again, what are you talking about? Landowners and other privilege holders own our rights to liberty, which enables them to force us into servitude, not the owners of producer goods. You can just decline to deal with the owner of producer goods and you are no worse off. The landowner, by contrast, initiates use of force against you to deprive you of what you would otherwise have.

Alienation and emptiness are human miseries that would not be available if our owners did not provide them.

No, emptiness and alienation are also experienced by the owners themselves, and in situations where ownership is irrelevant.

Yes, land was already here, and being lived on by humans. And then owners destroyed the natural balance that the land used to provide us.

Well, landowners deprived us of our liberty to access the means of sustenance that land would otherwise provide us, anyway. Owners of producer goods, by contrast, do not deprive us of anything. Why do you refuse to know the difference between them?

To picture the relationship of owners to nature, imagine a giant McMansion blocking a natural view of rivers and mountains. That McMansion wouldn't be there if not for owners and ownership.

That's actually a misleading analogy. A McMansion had to be built by labor. The landowner qua landowner doesn't build anything, he just makes others pay him for permission to build.

]]>2019-04-29T12:13:07+01:002019-04-29T12:13:07+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15001643#p15001643Here's what I was able to do last week. Usually I'd be done with the full post by now.

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ckaihatsu wrote:You're ideologically trying to assert that capital is necessary -- and is even the driving force of production -- when it's not because *labor* is required to enact any type of productivity, goods or services.

Truth To Power wrote:No, I'm just identifying the indisputable fact that unlike land, capital is a contribution to production that would not be available if its owner did not provide it. You have already realized that that fact proves your beliefs are false and evil, so you have to contrive some way of not knowing it.

Gratuitous insults aside, you're trying to make it sound like piles of currency somehow build buildings itself, and not people actively laboring in work roles.

Capital itself just provides a means for *social organization*, but cannot lift a single brick on its own -- that's what *labor* is needed for, in the production process.

ckaihatsu wrote:Further, capital is no longer *logistically* necessary for production, because workers can *collectivize* all productive implements the world over, using communications technology, and can coordinate over the kinds of production (networked supply chains) for each, filling in *consciously* over how machinery is to be used, for social need (free-access and direct-distribution), rather than leaving such to the *hands-off* *market* mechanism (the 'invisible hand').

Truth To Power wrote:No, that's just more meaningless Marxist gibberish from you. Workers can't collectivize or coordinate all productive implements, which ARE capital.

All you're doing here is giving an *opinion* -- *of course* workers have the objective / empirical *capacity*, or potential, to organize social production -- all it empirically takes is a meeting, and political meetings already happen all the time, as over teleconference calls, etc.

Unfortunately most people think 'Stalinism' and 'Stalin' when they hear the term 'socialism', when Stalinism was actually a historical *accident* -- no one in 1917 (the Bolshevik Revolution) was saying 'All power to Joseph Stalin', they were actually saying 'All power to the soviets', meaning collective workers councils, and it really happened that way for a sliver of historical time before Russia was invaded by the Whites / counterrevolutionaries, destroying much of the country's infrastructure and economy, necessitating a more-emergency-type approach to the running of the country, opening the door for Stalin and his infamous dictatorial-type rule and socialist revisionism, which is *not* socialism-as-originally-intended.

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ckaihatsu wrote:No, you're ignoring the *industry* that the workers are in -- if it's the *textile* industry, for example, then the workers there make *fabric*, up to the finished product of *clothing* (or whatever).

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong again. I’m ignoring the industry because it is irrelevant to the fact that without the capital goods’ owner's contribution, the workers can't produce more than a minuscule fraction of what they produce with the capital owner's help.

You're *continuing* to make these vacuous assertions without providing a *shred* of evidence or reasoning for these baseless claims.

It's only because of *capitalism* and the enforcement-by-violence from the capitalist nation-state that things are this way, requiring and validating capital as a catalyst to social productivity.

You're also ignoring that we're living in 2019 now, and virtually *everyone* has a smartphone, which is often as powerful as any laptop these days -- these present-day technological tools enable *any* configuration of ad hoc social networking, as through email, etc.

You're trying to *glorify* the role of capitalist management by *mystifying* it, when what it really boils down to is -- yes, you know it -- social networking within an enterprise, backed up by the violence of the capitalist nation-state.

Socialists will *commonly* point out that the capitalist 'corporation' entity is *internally* managed without recourse to market pricing or market exchanges, and so is a social configuration that's ripe for being seized by the international proletariat and collectively run for the sake of humanity's *humane* interests, effectively annihilating the need for any capital.

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ckaihatsu wrote:It's the *goods or services* that workers produce, and the wage is usually so insufficient that the workers can't even buy the products that they're making. That shows you that there's a big *discrepancy* between what the workers are given for their labor, and what the products of their labor are sold for on the market.

Truth To Power wrote:GARBAGE. If the value of the product is not greater than the value of the labor that goes into it, it's a waste of time making it. There's no net gain. Duh.

Exactly. Glad you agree with me on this point, since this is precisely what I was saying.

If the capitalist can't extract more value from the sale of the finished product at the market, than what was put into it (labor value minus wages, minus 'internal' / capital investments), then there's no point because the capitalist wouldn't be able to realize any profit from the process.

So, from the previous:

ckaihatsu wrote:[T]here's a big *discrepancy* between what the workers are given for their labor, and what the products of their labor are sold for on the market.

You just *admitted* this.

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ckaihatsu wrote:No, the 'law of rent', whatever that is,

Truth To Power wrote:You just proved you don't know even the most basic facts of economics. Why should I waste my time on such a person?

Okay, then *don't* -- there are plenty of other propertarians on the Internet who will gladly make the same points you're making, for my refutations.

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ckaihatsu wrote:No, the 'law of rent' [...] is *not* directly deterministic on what wages are paid out, as you erroneously claim.

Truth To Power wrote:My statement is correct. Though lots of non-market forces affect wages in actual economies, in a pure market economy, wages are determined by the productivity of labor on marginal land, given equal producer goods inputs. Everything else goes to landowners. Ricardo proved this more than 200 years ago.

Hmmmm, you're forgetting that *machinery* / infrastructure, too, is involved in the production process. I suppose international imperialist *warfare* (like World War II) is a clear-cut, dramatic example of that, where countries with superior industrial prowess were more-able to win out on the battlefield.

Regarding wages itself, that's an inter-class matter, and many labor strikes took place during WWII because of the bosses' / imperialists' *dependence* on industrial labor power at that time, to enable their winning of their nationalist victories.

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ckaihatsu wrote:You're trying to assert some kind of fixed principle here, when in fact wages vary and are specific to the management decisions of each particular company, in various industries.

Truth To Power wrote:Nope. Flat wrong. Management doesn't decide wages except to the extent that they attract better or worse workers by offering higher or lower wages for a given position. They just pay what they have to to get the kind of workers they want away from alternative employment, which is ultimately determined by production on marginal land, as landowners take everything above that.

ckaihatsu wrote:'Socially necessary' production is that production which is *objectively required* by workers, for their own consumption for their own life and living, and the continuation of the labor commodity going-forward ('sustainability').

Truth To Power wrote:So, just more made-up Marxist nonsense.

It's difficult to have a discussion if you don't even *try* to incorporate new information -- there's no 'Marxist nonsense' here, but rather what I just described:

ckaihatsu wrote:'Socially necessary' production is that production which is *objectively required* by workers, for their own consumption for their own life and living, and the continuation of the labor commodity going-forward ('sustainability').

In other words what's the *overhead* for labor -- ? Labor is made up of *people*, and labor has to have food and shelter like anyone else, *plus* whatever education and training is required for what they / we do. Add in child care, for future generations of labor, plus human creature comforts, and the material cost is the *propagation* of such total labor power, going-forward. Once this overall cost of existence, and future existence, can be satisfied from what labor produces, then what other point *is* there for labor?

Local 'community' / cultural standards for human existence and public infrastructure would be common for everyone, such as we have today for roads and other kinds of transportation, so those kinds of things are 'internal' to (local) humanity as a whole, which *assist* with the propagation of total labor power going-forward in time.

Under capitalism, though, laborers are worked *well beyond* the production of goods and services for their / our own humane existence and propagation (and common infrastructure). This, then, is termed 'surplus labor value' because the capitalist is *expropriating* value away from the labor of workers, so as to make a profit. Marxist theory points to this empirical fact and raises the question of 'Why can't the workers' own surplus labor value be distributed back to workers instead of stolen by the capitalist employer?'

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Truth To Power wrote:See? Just like capitalists, socialists refuse to know the difference between owning something you have contributed – capital -- and owning something of which you only deprive others, and demand that they pay you merely for your PERMISSION to use, like land.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're mixing contexts here -- you're trying to blame socialists for the different types of capital, equity and rentier.

Truth To Power wrote:No, I am identifying the fact that socialists, like capitalists, dishonestly refuse to know the difference between them, and am definitely blaming both capitalists and socialists for their dishonesty in that regard.

I can't verify this contention of yours -- I think most socialists probably don't bother with the distinction between rentier and equity capital because both types of capital still *exploit* the working class, just in different ways.

Regardless, you've shown yourself to be unable to acknowledge this fact, for whatever reason, and you're obviously part of the equity-capital faction within the capitalist class.

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ckaihatsu wrote:But the ownership class does not simply hand-down the full labor value, in wages, of what that labor-power, and its products, are sold for on the market. Instead it keeps the 'surplus labor value', beyond the straightforward costs of what labor requires to reproduce itself, going-forward.

ckaihatsu wrote:Socialism is a *political* approach, mainly to government / administration of society, while you're citing an empirical feature of existing capitalist production, somehow in an attempt to slight the political position of socialism. It makes no sense.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong again. The difference between capital goods and natural resources is the same under any production system: the natural resources were available anyway; the capital goods weren't.

I agree with this *empirically*, but you're sidestepping the fact that it's *labor* which does the work to convert available natural resources into socially useful *commodities* / infrastructure / capital goods.

So the answer to the question of 'How are capital goods created?' is 'By labor.'

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ckaihatsu wrote:Your conception of society and its political dynamics is woefully out-of-date -- these days we're in the era of *industrial* production, and what counts isn't the *land* so much as the *industrial equipment* used for the sake of production. Just consider the automotive or computer industries, which are vastly complex, and rely on sophisticated supply-chains, and robotic automation, for the products that they produce, cars and computers. Your erroneous 'land' argument is thoroughly, demonstrably misguided in the overall context of our contemporary world.

Truth To Power wrote:No, child. The fact that total land value is an order of magnitude greater than total equipment value proves me objectively right and you objectively wrong. O B J E C T I V E L Y. You'll find that happening a lot, as long as you presume to dispute with me.

Stop with the petty insults -- the flaw in your reasoning is that you're going by market-based *pricing*, which is distorted by *speculation* (recall the continuing dynamic of market-failure *asset bubbles*, including the historical tulip mania). We're back to the rentier-vs.-equity economic factionalism that we've already covered -- should land be considered as a rentier-type *asset*, or an equity-type *investment*, under capitalism?

If it's an *asset* (including the means of mass industrial production), then it's going to *act* like an asset, economically, and will command deflated / overvalued exchange-values as a result of its special material-social usefulness / productivity (also consider the early waves of home computers, as another example).

If it's an equity-type *investment*, then the only way for it to perform is from *capital gains*, from increased, speculative-type *valuations*, as with the tulip bulbs. But here's the problem: Productive infrastructure like factories actually *produce* useful, usable *commodities* that people need and want, yet the *ownership* of this productivity stays in *private* hands within capitalism, and exploits workers' labor-value in order to generate *private profits*.

So it's inherently a *material contradiction*: If working people are the ones creating new commodities, then why shouldn't those *workers* be able to collectively benefit economically from all of the work-effort that they're / we're putting-in? It's social *exploitation*, for private *benefit*, which makes no sense in material terms.

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ckaihatsu wrote:You seem to think that everything still takes place manually on *prairies* or something.

Truth To Power wrote:No. Land is not used only for agriculture, child. Its value is an order of magnitude greater than the value of equipment because of the value of locational advantage and access to the services and infrastructure the government provides and the opportunities and amenities the community provides. You just blankly refuse even to know the fact that land in Manhattan is worth more than farmland, despite being totally unsuited to agriculture.

There's no reason for you to be condescending and insulting just because you happen to disagree with my politics.

You're also *vacillating* on your perspective about this land-value issue -- in past posts you've *railed* against this economic dependence on land valuations, but now you're *defending* land values as being *valid* and fundamentally correct.

The fact that urban real estate happens to be valuated more highly than agricultural or industrial land doesn't mean much -- just that capital values are more built-up due to concentrated geography and financialization. You're having to depend on capitalism's *pricing* as your standard for valuations, and so now you're *stuck* with that kind of definition, and bucked by waves of financial speculation.

Is a tulip bulb really worth two lasts of wheat, four lasts of rye, four fat oxen, eight fat swine, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four tuns of beer, two tuns of butter, 1,000 lbs. of cheese, a complete bed, a suit of clothes, and a silver drinking cup -- ?

Truth To Power wrote:Huh?? You have not even offered an argument about value, which is what something would trade for. Jevons refuted the LTV in 1871 when he showed that the LTV is a delusion that has cause and effect reversed: labor does not cause value in its product; rather, producers devote labor to producing a product until the marginal labor cost is equal to the marginal exchange value of that product.

Truth To Power wrote:No, that's another fabrication on your part. I never said or implied that labor had no cost. You just made it up because you have no actual facts or logic to offer in support of your false and evil beliefs.

I'm neither 'false' nor 'evil', and my point stands: You're acknowledging that labor has a cost to the capitalist ('wages').

You're also *incorrect* that the necessary labor value (wages) equals the exchange value of the produced product (price), because if that were the case the capitalist employer would not see any profit from that conversion process, something we both know is the whole *incentive* and *reality* under capitalism.

ckaihatsu wrote:(Also note the historical tendency for the rate of profit to *decline*.)

Truth To Power wrote:I notice no such thing. The historical tendency is for land rent to increase a little faster than GDP, but the market for investment vehicles ensures that the risk-adjusted rate of profit stays competitive across vehicles.

So the reality is that the capitalist is seeing *less and less return* over the decades from investments -- at this rate there could soon be a day when it just wouldn't be worth getting out of bed, because the low rate of profit would not be sufficient incentive for being involved in financial activity, whether productive or non-productive. This would be the market failure to end *all* market failures, since the whole capitalist system would be non-functional at that point.

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ckaihatsu wrote:Labor value theory simply looks at the productive process from the perspective of the *laborer*, in seeing what the costs are there in *maintaining* the same quantity of labor-power going-forward (whether unskilled or skilled). Anything *above* the threshold of this maintenance of labor-power is called 'surplus labor value', and that's what the capitalist *expropriates* for private gain ('profit').

Truth To Power wrote:IOW, it is pure question-begging, and simply REFUSES TO KNOW the fact that the capitalist's contribution of machinery, etc. to production increased production above what it would otherwise have been -- or indeed that it ever occurred at all.

There's no 'contribution' since the capitalist owner is effectively *renting-out* the machinery / factory, and blurring the line as to whether the means of mass industrial production is a rentier-type *asset*, or an equity-type *investment* -- either way the wage-slave / worker is being *exploited* because of the empirical necessity to sell his or her labor-power for a wage, for the necessities of life and living, while the commodities produced are *expropriated* by the factory owner(s), to sell at a profit.

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ckaihatsu wrote:(See the 'Business' diagram from my previous post.)

Truth To Power wrote:Your diagrams have no basis in empirical fact.

Bullshit -- you're opinionating again, and showing no comprehension. I doubt you even looked at any of them.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong again. The workers' labor is a contribution of private effort to production, as is the capitalist's machinery, etc.

No, the capital that's put into the productive process is itself *non-productive* -- it's simply a social designation regarding how productive assets (machinery, factories) are to be allocated and organized within the overall supply chains of productivity (for commodity-production of goods and services).

There wouldn't even *be* machinery and factories, etc., if it weren't for the labor efforts of workers. A stack of currency isn't itself *productive* in any way.

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ckaihatsu wrote:Under capitalism capital ownership and its right to exploit labor are backed up *by the state*, including with violence.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong again. Ownership of capital does not confer any right or power to exploit labor because the capital owner only OFFERS the worker access to opportunity he would not otherwise have. Unlike ownership of land, ownership of capital is not based on state violence but on the fact that the owner is objectively responsible for its existence. Only ownership of land and other privileges confers power to exploit labor, by DEPRIVING workers of access to opportunity they WOULD otherwise have. Your false and evil beliefs are based on refusal to know that fact.

It's a *stacked deck* -- workers / wage-slaves are *compelled* to sell their labor power to bosses because they / we have no other means for securing the necessities of life and living, whereas any owner of capital has *those* material resources at his or her disposal, *above* one's own labor-power.

The nation-state serves the material interests of capitalist *ownership*, and not the interests of the working class. The nation-state *does* back up capitalist interests with the threat and reality of organized violence, as we've seen from numerous imperialist wars, as with NATO's predations in Libya, for example.

Land ownership may or may not exploit labor, but in modern times its *industrial production* (private ownership of the means of mass industrial production) that exploits labor. The land itself isn't what exploits labor, rather it's the *productive process* (factories) that exploits labor, for profit-making through capital gains.

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ckaihatsu wrote:No, again, I don't *have* beliefs -- I'm making statements based on how the world actually functions, without being false or evil, nor altering anything, nor evading anything.

Truth To Power wrote:ROTFL!! Your claims are false, absurd, and borderline delusional.

Bullshit.

Your opinions are worthless here, and you haven't backed up your numerous baseless claims with any references to fact or reasoning.

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Truth To Power wrote:Right: I support private ownership of and control over what is privately produced until such time as it is bought by a public authority at market value.

ckaihatsu wrote:That's not going to happen -- the workers of the world have no reason to *respect* your so-called 'private ownership'.

Truth To Power wrote:Of course they do: their desire for liberty, justice, prosperity – and survival.

See -- you're being *partisan*, in the interests of elitism. Whenever a group of workers -- like recently at Matamoros -- say that they want a bigger slice of the pie that they've produced, they have to be taken seriously because they're able to collectively *withhold their labor* for a period of time, depriving the bosses of profit-making.

'Liberty', 'justice', 'prosperity', and 'survival' are all just bourgeois buzzwords that mean *nothing* outside of an actual concrete situation, like that of Matamoros. As long as people dispossessed of capital and property are forced to sell their labor for the necessities of life and living they / we will have an objective collective interest in the forcible *seizing* of the means of mass industrial production, to bring such 'in-house' and away from private elitist control of the same. (That's what 'class' is.)

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ckaihatsu wrote:The means of mass industrial production need to be *seized* by the working class, otherwise workers will never be able to collectively *control* the same.

Truth To Power wrote:<yawn> How's that working out for them in Venezuela, as it has in North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, the USSR, Cuba, Maoist China, etc.? An honest, intelligent worker knows he is not competent to control the means of production, especially not "collectively," as a "class."

'Not competent' -- ?

Workers are the actual people who *work* on that machinery every day, no matter what the industry is. It's the workers who are *most competent* at controlling the means of mass industrial production, while bosses and managers do *not* actually labor on such machinery and productive processes because what *they* do is look after the interests of capital, *managing* the roles and activities of labor, but are *not* active themselves on productive activites.

]]>2019-04-27T17:58:08+01:002019-04-27T17:58:08+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15001387#p15001387Truth To Power wrote:...capital is a contribution to production that would not be available if its owner did not provide it.

Yes, the all important owners.

Technology and behaviorism are contributions to our extinction that would not be available if our owners did not provide them.

Dog-like servitude is a human condition that would not be available if our owners did not provide it.

Alienation and emptiness are human miseries that would not be available if our owners did not provide them.

Unlike land

Yes, land was already here, and being lived on by humans. And then owners destroyed the natural balance that the land used to provide us. To picture the relationship of owners to nature, imagine a giant McMansion blocking a natural view of rivers and mountains. That McMansion wouldn't be there if not for owners and ownership.

]]>2019-04-23T18:11:22+01:002019-04-23T18:11:22+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=15000685#p15000685ckaihatsu wrote:You're ideologically trying to assert that capital is necessary -- and is even the driving force of production -- when it's not because *labor* is required to enact any type of productivity, goods or services.

No, I'm just identifying the indisputable fact that unlike land, capital is a contribution to production that would not be available if its owner did not provide it. You have already realized that that fact proves your beliefs are false and evil, so you have to contrive some way of not knowing it.

Further, capital is no longer *logistically* necessary for production, because workers can *collectivize* all productive implements the world over, using communications technology, and can coordinate over the kinds of production (networked supply chains) for each, filling in *consciously* over how machinery is to be used, for social need (free-access and direct-distribution), rather than leaving such to the *hands-off* *market* mechanism (the 'invisible hand').

No, that's just more meaningless Marxist gibberish from you. Workers can't collectivize or coordinate all productive implements, which ARE capital.

No, you're ignoring the *industry* that the workers are in -- if it's the *textile* industry, for example, then the workers there make *fabric*, up to the finished product of *clothing* (or whatever).

Wrong again. I’m ignoring the industry because it is irrelevant to the fact that without the capital goods’ owner's contribution, the workers can't produce more than a minuscule fraction of what they produce with the capital owner's help.

It's the *goods or services* that workers produce, and the wage is usually so insufficient that the workers can't even buy the products that they're making. That shows you that there's a big *discrepancy* between what the workers are given for their labor, and what the products of their labor are sold for on the market.

GARBAGE. If the value of the product is not greater than the value of the labor that goes into it, it's a waste of time making it. There's no net gain. Duh.

No, the 'law of rent', whatever that is,

You just proved you don't know even the most basic facts of economics. Why should I waste my time on such a person?

is *not* directly deterministic on what wages are paid out, as you erroneously claim.

My statement is correct. Though lots of non-market forces affect wages in actual economies, in a pure market economy, wages are determined by the productivity of labor on marginal land, given equal producer goods inputs. Everything else goes to landowners. Ricardo proved this more than 200 years ago.

You're trying to assert some kind of fixed principle here, when in fact wages vary and are specific to the management decisions of each particular company, in various industries.

Nope. Flat wrong. Management doesn't decide wages except to the extent that they attract better or worse workers by offering higher or lower wages for a given position. They just pay what they have to to get the kind of workers they want away from alternative employment, which is ultimately determined by production on marginal land, as landowners take everything above that.

'Socially necessary' production is that production which is *objectively required* by workers, for their own consumption for their own life and living, and the continuation of the labor commodity going-forward ('sustainability').

So, just more made-up Marxist nonsense.

You're mixing contexts here -- you're trying to blame socialists for the different types of capital, equity and rentier.

No, I am identifying the fact that socialists, like capitalists, dishonestly refuse to know the difference between them, and am definitely blaming both capitalists and socialists for their dishonesty in that regard.

Socialism is a *political* approach, mainly to government / administration of society, while you're citing an empirical feature of existing capitalist production, somehow in an attempt to slight the political position of socialism. It makes no sense.

Wrong again. The difference between capital goods and natural resources is the same under any production system: the natural resources were available anyway; the capital goods weren't.

Your conception of society and its political dynamics is woefully out-of-date -- these days we're in the era of *industrial* production, and what counts isn't the *land* so much as the *industrial equipment* used for the sake of production. Just consider the automotive or computer industries, which are vastly complex, and rely on sophisticated supply-chains, and robotic automation, for the products that they produce, cars and computers. Your erroneous 'land' argument is thoroughly, demonstrably misguided in the overall context of our contemporary world.

No, child. The fact that total land value is an order of magnitude greater than total equipment value proves me objectively right and you objectively wrong. O B J E C T I V E L Y. You'll find that happening a lot, as long as you presume to dispute with me.

You seem to think that everything still takes place manually on *prairies* or something.

No. Land is not used only for agriculture, child. Its value is an order of magnitude greater than the value of equipment because of the value of locational advantage and access to the services and infrastructure the government provides and the opportunities and amenities the community provides. You just blankly refuse even to know the fact that land in Manhattan is worth more than farmland, despite being totally unsuited to agriculture.

No, that's another fabrication on your part. I never said or implied that labor had no cost. You just made it up because you have no actual facts or logic to offer in support of your false and evil beliefs.

(Also note the historical tendency for the rate of profit to *decline*.)

I notice no such thing. The historical tendency is for land rent to increase a little faster than GDP, but the market for investment vehicles ensures that the risk-adjusted rate of profit stays competitive across vehicles.

Labor value theory simply looks at the productive process from the perspective of the *laborer*, in seeing what the costs are there in *maintaining* the same quantity of labor-power going-forward (whether unskilled or skilled). Anything *above* the threshold of this maintenance of labor-power is called 'surplus labor value', and that's what the capitalist *expropriates* for private gain ('profit').

IOW, it is pure question-begging, and simply REFUSES TO KNOW the fact that the capitalist's contribution of machinery, etc. to production increased production above what it would otherwise have been -- or indeed that it ever occurred at all.

(See the 'Business' diagram from my previous post.)

Your diagrams have no basis in empirical fact.

'Private effort' doesn't produce *shit* -- it's the *workers* who are the ones doing the producing.

Wrong again. The workers' labor is a contribution of private effort to production, as is the capitalist's machinery, etc.

Under capitalism capital ownership and its right to exploit labor are backed up *by the state*, including with violence.

Wrong again. Ownership of capital does not confer any right or power to exploit labor because the capital owner only OFFERS the worker access to opportunity he would not otherwise have. Unlike ownership of land, ownership of capital is not based on state violence but on the fact that the owner is objectively responsible for its existence. Only ownership of land and other privileges confers power to exploit labor, by DEPRIVING workers of access to opportunity they WOULD otherwise have. Your false and evil beliefs are based on refusal to know that fact.

No, again, I don't *have* beliefs -- I'm making statements based on how the world actually functions, without being false or evil, nor altering anything, nor evading anything.

ROTFL!! Your claims are false, absurd, and borderline delusional.

That's not going to happen -- the workers of the world have no reason to *respect* your so-called 'private ownership'.

Of course they do: their desire for liberty, justice, prosperity – and survival.

The means of mass industrial production need to be *seized* by the working class, otherwise workers will never be able to collectively *control* the same.

<yawn> How's that working out for them in Venezuela, as it has in North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, the USSR, Cuba, Maoist China, etc.? An honest, intelligent worker knows he is not competent to control the means of production, especially not "collectively," as a "class."

So you don't recognize 'intellectual property' as being valid? Under capitalism there are certainly *private costs* inherently associated with the *development* of certain kinds of knowledge -- 'research and development' (R&D) -- and your political theory has no way of *addressing* these kinds of private costs, as in the practice of existing 'intellectual property'.

Your claims continue to be false. My theory very much addresses such costs, just not through the granting of monopoly privileges. And IP monopoly privilege does not address development costs, it only confers exclusionary profits. There is little relation between the two.

It's a sinkhole in your overall politics.

<yawn> Stop making so many false and disingenuous claims about my politics, of which you are self-evidently totally ignorant and eager to remain so.

You seem to think that intellectual property should be paid-for *privately* while being made accessible *publicly*, which is *socialism* over intellectual property.

No, it's non-ownership, not collective ownership. Your claims about my views are just strawmen, fabrications with no basis in anything I have said.

Okay, but which *is* it, then -- ?

Liberty, justice and truth, which you hate, to the extent that you can even conceive them.

By touting your anti-government-interference line

You are makin' $#!+ up again. You have no choice.

there would be no *regulations* on the functioning of the economy,

Fabrication.

which means that labor would be allowed to be exploited *even more* than it already is, which would be a 'legalized theft' of what its product is worth on the market.

No, because labor and capital would no longer have to support the parasitic landowning and monopoly privilege classes, and the return to capital would be competed away. There's no one left to get the money but labor. You just have to contrive some way to avoid knowing that fact, because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

(Recall that anything not-paid to labor is by definition a *capital* cost, such as for private infrastructure, equipment, etc.

I recall that definition is fallacious and dishonest question begging.

If one eliminates all government regulations, such as for a minimum wage, then labor will be paid in wages *even less* than it's already paid for its labor-power, thus exploiting it even more.)

I don’t propose eliminating all regulation, just privilege and the regulations, such as minimum wages, that futilely attempt to reverse its harmful effects. Besides, which is better: being paid a minimum wage of $10, of which you have to pay $5 to privilege owners, or being paid $8, of which you get to keep everything?

You're being *contradictory* again

I have not been contradictory, stop makin' $#!+ up.

-- why should the current markets for job-employment, home-having, food shopping (etc.), and public services and infrastructure, be *subsidized* by the state, as you're implying (since the private sector wouldn't be paying for it, and neither would it be a cost to the consumer) -- ?

Because it is the state that deprives people of their liberty to use land, and thus owes them just compensation. The current privileged and parasitic (not productive) private sector WOULD be paying for it, because they would no longer be able to pocket the value of publicly created location rents. Everyone would have free, secure, adequate access to economic opportunity because those who wanted to exclude others from more than that would have to pay for the public services and infrastructure everyone else would access for free. No one would be exploited, no one subsidized, because everyone would get just (market) compensation for what they contributed to production, and for the liberty they had to give up to enable more productive exclusive use of land, and would pay the market price for what they deprived others of. My proposal all makes sense, it is all consensual, just, and free, as you would see if you could only find a willingness to know facts.

So do you tout non-government-interference, or do you *support* government intervention in all sectors that experience 'market failure' (as for full-employment, housing, food, public services, public infrastructure) -- ?

I definitely support government intervention in cases of market failure, but food and housing aren't such cases. The failures we see in them are caused by non-market interventions like the subsidy to idle landowning.

Your contradictory political basis is making you sound like a typical politician during election season, talking out of both sides of their mouth, making empty promises to the electorate that they'll never keep once elected.

It only sounds impossible to you because you refuse to know the relevant facts of objective physical reality.

You're erroneously equating socialism with historical *Stalinism*, when Stalinism was actually the result of an implicit *compromise* between the Bolshevik Revolution, as mitigated by Western imperialism. (No Bolshevik was *ever* advocating for nation-state-bound *Stalinism* -- rather, that's simply what historically *emerged* from competing forces.)

Wrong again. With astonishing prescience, Rosa Luxemburg told Lenin exactly what would be the end result of politically enforced collectivization. No other is possible.

Also note that market dependence only succeeds in terms of its own abstracted *market values* -- factors like organic / social human *need* are considered as 'externalities'

That’s just factually wrong. Your ignorance of the basics of economics is showing again.

and are not taken-into-account, even if people wind up *starving* due to materially-preventable famine and its knock-on effects. Fewer consumers means a *strengthening* of the nationalist exchange values / currency, or *deflation* / value-appreciation, as we're seeing today.

Gibberish unrelated to empirical fact.

A socialist-type *planned* economy can formally *politicize* factors like human need, bringing such into the consciously-planning process, something that the market mechanism *cannot* do since it *externalizes* such human costs off of the formal balance-sheet, inherently.

Nope. Wrong again. Your socialist-type planned economy starved ~100M people to death in the 20th C, while market economies have achieved steady reductions in famine, starvation, hunger and poverty.

Again you're conflating socialism with (historical) *Stalinism*, which is incorrect and inappropriate.

No, it is correct and appropriate.<irrelevancy snipped>

Socialism may be demonized but that doesn't make it any less *appropriate* or relevant to the existing world situation at-hand.

True: it COULDN'T be any less appropriate or relevant to the existing or any other actual situation, past or future.

Sounds like you're stuck in-between, ideologically -- small-scale agrarian ownership is your ideological worldview, and it is no longer how meaningful production is done these days.

No, you are just makin' $#!+ up again. I’ve suggested no such thing.

But here's the thing: the benefits of capitalist production are inherently *privatized*, so it's *not* for a 'common effort, project, or fund' -- or, rather, any such 'commonness' of production is *incidental*, because the *real* benefits are *privatized*, in the form of *profits*.

Production involving more than one person is a common effort and project, and the real benefits are indeed privatized in the form of profits AND WAGES for those who contribute (and land and privilege rents for some who don't).

'Supply' only caters to those who can *pay* for it, under capitalism, with 'human need' as an *externality*, well off the balance sheet.

OK, so you don't know what "externality" means, either.

Well, sure, in the equity-capital-versus-rentier-capital schism I'm on the side of *equity* capital since it does lend itself to varied production, unlike the feudal-like *rentier capital* functioning.

And unlike rentier capital, capital goods are a contribution to production, not just an extraction from it.

But *both* types of capital still *exploit* the labor class since wages are *decreased* by life-necessary payments for goods and services, and also for paying rent for housing

No, the fact that people have to pay for the things they deprive others of is not exploitation. It is the landless having to pay landowners for what government, the community and nature provide that is obviously exploitation.

Also your ideology repeatly implies that all land would still be 'the commons' for everyone if only it weren't for the dastardly private ownership of *land* -- which is yet *another* contradiction in your position.

It's not a contradiction in the least, stop makin' $#!+ up.

Which is it, should land be privately owned, or shouldn't it be?

It can never rightly be owned at all, only administered in trust to secure and reconcile the equal individual rights of all the people to use it.

If not, then why stop at land? Why not expand such a socialist-type application to productive goods (factories) and all commodities in total?

Because those things are provided by their owners, who are less likely to provide more if what they provide is stolen from them, while land was already there with no help from the present or any previous owner, and no more or less will be available in any event. You just have to refuse to know such facts, because you have already realized that they prove your beliefs are false and evil.

I *get* it

No, you self-evidently and indisputably don't:

But what *I* was establishing is that there are different types of *production* within capitalism, that of social-necessity-vs.-luxury-production. Luxury production happens to be *more profitable*, but it's *socially* *unnecessary*, because it doesn't supply for basic human needs, like food and shelter

See? Luxury production is not more profitable, MONOPOLY is more profitable.

If I'm so "wrong" then what would you say about *financial* goods like equity capital?

What you call, “equity capital” is an undifferentiated melange of natural resources, privilege, financial instruments, capital goods, and shareholdings in companies that may own any combination thereof. It’s just a way of evading the fact that those things are all different.

If enough of it is invested then its inherent costs will be paid-for by the *banking institution*,

GARBAGE. You clearly also know nothing about banking.

not to mention its present-day *miniturization* into electrical impulses through computer circuitry and as magnetic traces on hard drives, etc.

You are conflating capital goods with financial products by calling them both "equity capital," just as Marx conflated capital goods with land by calling them both "the means of production.”

I thought you were *against* rentier-type capital -- why are you now *defending* it?

I'm not. I'm identifying facts that you refuse to know because you have already realized that they prove your beliefs are false and evil.

Why are you trying to confuse readers with irrelevancies? An account balance on a hard drive is not capital goods. That is why you use the nonsense term "equity capital": you have to conflate capital goods with financial products in order to evade the facts.

You realize that this argument of yours entirely rests on the *quantity* of the capital in question, right?

No; I am aware of the fact that it does not have anything to do with the quantity of capital AT ALL.

All you're doing is effectively saying that 'Smaller capital concerns won't be nearly as competitive as larger capital concerns'.

No I'm not. You just made that up.

You're not even addressing my point, which is about the material social status of *workers*.

Wrong. I am addressing it as it should be addressed: by reference to their RIGHTS, which landowning and other privileges have removed.

Again you're making a strawman-type dichotomy in which either it's capitalism or an outer-space-like *void* for workers.

False. It is YOU who are invoking a false dichotomy between capitalism and socialism.

It really mirrors the White-Man's-Burden kind of argument in that without the "generosity" of the ruling class people would otherwise have to starve to death while sitting on their hands. You're just supplying propaganda for the sake of the ruling class, which doesn't cut it here.

Nonsense. You again refuse to know the difference between the capital owner's offer of additional opportunity and the landowner's removal of people's access to opportunity that would otherwise be available by calling both of them the "ruling class."

This is 100% patronizing because it's the *workers* who do the actual work of baking bread or whatever -- workers could certainly produce and exist without the bosses,

Now you are trying to change the subject from capital goods owners to “bosses.” Workers would certainly be worse off but for the offer of opportunity the capital goods owner makes, while they would be BETTER off if they did not have to pay landowners for PERMISSION to use what nature provided. You just have to contrive some way to avoid knowing that fact, because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

but the bosses could not exist without the labor of the workers.

Again, that's just objectively false, as proved by the fact that bosses often start out as self-employed workers.

No, you can't just blame this on rentier-type land ownership -- what you're ignoring is that the equity owner *also* exploits the worker, through the process of production, by expropriating surplus labor value.

No, that's just false. Unlike the landowner, the capital goods owner doesn't and can't expropriate anything, he only offers the worker opportunity he would not otherwise have. What stops the worker from just declining the employer’s offer? Oh, wait a minute, that’s right: the LANDOWNER removed his liberty to support himself using what nature provided.

Blaming the equity-capital owner is *not* equivalent to blaming the worker

Right. Which might be why I pointed out that socialists do the former, capitalists the latter.

again, the worker is *compelled* to work for the necessities of life and living, while the capital owner has an obvious *surplus* of wealth compared to his or her *personal* needs for life and living.

]]>2019-04-16T19:58:02+01:002019-04-16T19:58:02+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=156559&p=14999570#p14999570Rancid wrote:Economist in fact do study things like how quarter backs make decisions. Same with how people pick mates.

Maybe (sources?); but when they do, they are not doing economics. Not all decisions are economic decisions.

Of course, this starts to blur in with psychology and what not. However, that is a field of economics, which is called behavior economics.

It may be called behavior economics, but it is psychology, not economics. Economists, like many "experts" who don't actually understand much of their own field, like to claim their expertise has wider application than it does. See the climatologists who think they know how to run the world.

]]>2019-04-16T18:45:57+01:002019-04-16T18:45:57+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=156559&p=14999561#p14999561Truth To Power wrote:That seems too broad, as it would include how people decide which profiles to swipe right on, how a quarterback decides which receiver to throw to, etc. IMO economics more accurately studies how people relieve scarcity by means of production, allocation and exchange.

Economist in fact do study things like how quarter backs make decisions. Same with how people pick mates. Of course, this starts to blur in with psychology and what not. However, that is a field of economics, which is called behavior economics.

]]>2019-04-15T20:26:51+01:002019-04-15T20:26:51+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=156559&p=14999456#p14999456Rancid wrote:A more precise definition of what economics is, is the process/study of how people make decisions in a world were resources are scarce.

That seems too broad, as it would include how people decide which profiles to swipe right on, how a quarterback decides which receiver to throw to, etc. IMO economics more accurately studies how people relieve scarcity by means of production, allocation and exchange.

]]>2019-04-15T18:48:40+01:002019-04-15T18:48:40+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=156559&p=14999448#p14999448Statistics: Posted by Rancid — 15 Apr 2019 18:48
]]>2019-04-15T16:29:26+01:002019-04-15T16:29:26+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=156559&p=14999422#p14999422ralfy wrote:If only you can defend yourself. Just one. Give it a shot. LOL.

Defend the facts? No problem.

Yes, I'm sure that $1.2 quadrillion in shadow derivatives are backed by "workers, products of labor, and natural resources."

OK, so you don't understand that derivatives are just bets, and are backed by nothing but the other guys' bets.

You're here to help me. Oh, the irony.

You won't progress if you resist learning.

Actually, that's my point, genius.

No, actually, it's not, which is why you made a fool of yourself.

ralfy wrote:Increasing debt coupled with increasing material resources and energy needed to back up that debt, and the latter facing diminishing returns.

Debt is backed by the debtor's legal obligation to repay it, not by material resources or energy, and it faces diminishing returns because asset prices rise too high for debt to be serviced from their yield.

]]>2019-04-13T09:28:31+01:002019-04-13T09:28:31+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=156559&p=14999044#p14999044Truth To Power wrote:Thanks for your contribution of silly nonsense.

If only you can defend yourself. Just one. Give it a shot. LOL.

<sigh> Workers, products of labor, and natural resources are all part of the physical universe, and all very much of concern to economics. So you are merely making a fool of yourself, here. But that's OK. I am here to help you.

Yes, I'm sure that $1.2 quadrillion in shadow derivatives are backed by "workers, products of labor, and natural resources."

You're here to help me. Oh, the irony.

BWAHAHHAHAAAAAA!!

That's pretty funny, coming from a clown who doesn't even know that money is only economically meaningful inasmuch as it can be used to buy things in the physical universe that aren't money.

]]>2019-04-06T14:56:23+01:002019-04-06T14:56:23+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=14997783#p14997783Truth To Power wrote:No. The neoclassical impoverishment of economic theory lay in its gleeful adoption of Marx's impoverishment of economic theory: refusal to distinguish between land and capital goods.

I *understand* where you're coming from, but your finite-land-versus-infinite-capital-goods distinction -- even if manifested, would still only amount to *reformism* of the capitalist system and its profit-making function.

Once someone, or a joint-stock arrangement of several, got ahold of a factory, that private property power over social production would prevail to exploit the workers of their labor-power, regardless.

You're continuing to think that equity capital is somehow *blameless* in comparison to rent- and interest-expropriating *rentier* capital, and that equity capital somehow *doesn't* expropriate surplus labor value for its profits.

I've already covered this -- workers are *not* paid the full value of what the products of their labor are sold for on the market as the finished commodity, because if they were there would be no profits available for the exploiter / merchant -- it would just be a straight pass-through of value transformation.

Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Truth To Power wrote:Right, because it deprives people of what they would otherwise have: their liberty to support themselves by using what was already there, with no help from any self-styled landowner or anyone else.

This is purely bullshit rhetoric, and isn't even helpful -- you propertarians / 'libertarians' keep pretending that we're still in some kind of agricultural utopia, where land in North America can just be had for the taking by white land speculators, for small-scale, self-sufficient-type production. This is *not* the world we live in today -- land itself no longer confers any material advantage, in the shadow of modern corporate financial colonialism over mass industrial production, for the regular consumer commodities of contemporary life.

Truth To Power wrote:Right, because it doesn't deprive anyone of anything they would otherwise have. If you don't like a factory owner's offer to let you use the capital goods he is contributing to enhance your productivity, fine, don't accept it. He will leave you alone. The landowner, by contrast, won't leave you alone if you try to exercise your liberty right to use the natural resources neither he nor any previous landowner contributed.

Your line here is *incredibly* blinkered -- you seem to think that income inequality doesn't exist, and that the *class division* doesn't exist, that we're somehow all on the same, level playing field and that individual 'choices' all feed into a complex, but fair, heuristics of life results. This is pure libertarian *mythology*, because our lives are actually all defined at *mass* scales, according to our relationship to the means of mass industrial production -- if one has the ownership to generate profits, by rentier *or* equity capital, then one has a clear objective advantage over labor, meaning those who must sell their labor power to such ownership for the sake of a wage, for one's own life and living.

Truth To Power wrote:Like capitalists, socialists like you just refuse to know the difference between the factory owner and the landowner. It's the same error, just made for the opposite reason.

Now you're trying to conflate socialists and capitalists, for some reason, while making a financial false dichotomy between the landowner and the factory owner. A factory owner, privately owning the empirical power of production (factory production), *is* a land owner as well since the factory has to be located *somewhere*, on some land.

Truth To Power wrote:Nope. It's privilege -- legal entitlements to benefit from the abrogation of others' rights without making just compensation -- that are the unrecognized economic CRIME of our age.

See -- by validating the bourgeois legal superstructure (by acknowledging legal 'privilege') you're effectively *upholding* bourgeois government, despite your contrived *railing against* such, as a part of your ideology, which is effectively *Western Civilization*. The expropriation of Native American land in North America, and elsewhere, happened well over two centuries ago, and you're attempting to make it sound like *white land speculators* somehow got ripped-off, when in fact it was *social minorities* like Native Americans, low-status European immigrants, blacks, and women, who got ripped-off as a result of this historical land-grab.

Your ideology is one of *historical falsification*, which is the best that Western Civilization can do these days.

Truth To Power wrote:No, I only identify the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality and their inescapable logical implications. You are either willing to know those facts and their implications, or you aren't. You aren't. Simple.

Bullshit, asshole.

Truth To Power wrote:Because it doesn't harm anyone else.

Get this through your head: Equity capital grows in quantity over time due to its inherent *expropriation* of surplus labor value from the *exploitation* of workers' labor-power.

Truth To Power wrote:If there's one thing you cannot accuse me of, it is doing anything under cover.

Give up your pseudonym, then.

Truth To Power wrote:No, it's the owner of land who is unproductive, not the asset -- in contrast to the factory owner, without whose contribution the factory would not exist.

This is *more* in a line of bullshit -- *both* the owner and the land itself are *non-productive*, in material terms.

Capital valuations are fully derived from labor-power, and newly bought productive assets -- factories -- then enable the *further* exploitation of labor for increasing its profits and valuations.

The factory owner *doesn't* 'contribute' *anything* -- the ownership of productive assets (factories) is a form of *social domination* because it enables the *expropriation* of labor value from workers, through the productive process -- mass industrial production.

Truth To Power wrote:You are the very last person on earth who can accuse anyone else of refusal to understand, as that is effectively your ONLY method of argument or thought.

I really *don't care* whether you (and others) understand or not -- the *content* of what I'm saying does not depend *in the least* on whether you understand or not, contrary to your pathetic assertions.

Truth To Power wrote:Nope. Value is simply what a thing would trade for, so there is no a priori relationship to labor. Value is simply where utility (demand) and scarcity (supply) meet. THAT'S ALL. The Marxist Labor Theory of Value is objectively incorrect, as Jevons showed nearly 150 years ago, because it transposes the cause and the effect. Things do not have value because labor is devoted to their production; rather, labor is devoted to production of things to the extent that they are expected to have value.

Wrong -- a newly-made commodity can be valued in terms of what it was *made from*, before it reaches the market -- you're sampling 'value' only in terms of *market pricing*, which itself is subject to speculative bubbles, market failures, and other irregularities that distort its underlying value due to a preoccupation with *face values*.

Truth To Power wrote:Nope. That is just another bald falsehood from you. The earth was not created by labor efforts, yet humanity can only exist by using it. Your whole absurd Marxist belief system is based on such objectively and provably false claims.

It's not about *land* itself -- it's about how land and productive goods (factories) are *valued*, which is by *commodification*, under capitalism. Commodities only exist due to the input of *labor*.

Marxism isn't about *belief* in the least -- note that I'm not *opinionating* at all. I'm simply referring to facts of the objective social world, like class and exploitation of labor.

Truth To Power wrote:Your "argument" consists of nothing but your blank refusal to know the fact that value is what a thing would trade for, which depends ONLY on the combination of utility (demand) and scarcity (supply). We devote labor to producing things because we think they will be both scarce and useful. But it is not the labor that makes them scarce and useful. Indeed, the labor of producing them makes them LESS scarce, and thus REDUCES their value. Marxist claptrap is the exact, diametric opposite of the truth.

You're obviously unable to resolve the contradiction between objective labor *inputs*, and the *valuation* of the same, in the finished commodity. If 'value' is only defined by market pricing, yet is created in the first place by labor, then how do you value the labor-input / labor-power itself? It can't be by the *wage* paid to the workers, because the *product* of that labor is *much more* than the wage (enabling the profit). This is a *gaping black hole* in your theoretical approach.

Since labor is itself treated as a commodity under capitalism, it, too, becomes subject to dynamics of supply and demand, and is usually in a state of 'overproduction' (availability, due to worker's empirical need for a wage, for the materials of life and living, compared to elitist capital ownership).

---

ckaihatsu wrote:Exploiting the masses' *labor-power*, that is.

Truth To Power wrote:Silly Marxist garbage.

No, it's not. See above.

Truth To Power wrote:Absurd, antiscientific Marxist claptrap. Science is a method of obtaining knowledge.

Science doesn't have to be simply *reductionistic*, as has been the practice in the Western Enlightenment tradition -- it can also be *creative*, or 'bottom-up', as happens through the process of *inductive* reasoning.

Inductive reasoning is a method of reasoning in which the premises are viewed as supplying some evidence for the truth of the conclusion, this is in contrast to deductive reasoning. While the conclusion of a deductive argument is certain, the truth of the conclusion of an inductive argument may be probable, based upon the evidence given.[1]

Many dictionaries define inductive reasoning as the derivation of general principles from specific observations, though some sources find this usage "outdated".[2]

Truth To Power wrote:Labor inputs do not determine utility and scarcity, and thus do not determine value.

And yet, there they are, in the production process, yet you can't seem to find a way to valuate them, under your ideology / theory. Astounding.

Truth To Power wrote:Of course they are: their supply cannot be augmented by labor, and does not respond to price.

More bullshit -- what happened to supply-and-demand? Spain took on the risk of going to the Western-unexplored New World for the sake of finding gold.

Truth To Power wrote:The resource was already there. Discovery is not production: all it does is improve the discoverer's own knowledge. You know this.

Then the actual *expropriation* of these natural resources requires *labor*, and labor-value.

Truth To Power wrote:No, I am identifying the self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality that you have to refuse to know, because you have already realized that they prove your beliefs are false and evil.

More psychological *projection* from you -- you're *way* more 'false and evil' than I'll ever be, as I've shown over and over again in these posts.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:that of 'incentivizing the capital owner', which is just 'trickle-down' / supply-side economics, a contrived justification for the prevailing bourgeois practice of rewarding wealth with more wealth in an erroneous ideological "motivation" to spur new investments of capital within an already-glutted market / social-reality.

Truth To Power wrote:Another false claim from you. Trickle down economics was contrived as a disingenuous justification for rent seeking and leaving rent income untaxed. The producer's right to own his product in fact does NOT reward wealth with more wealth. It rewards PRODUCTION with more wealth. You just have to contrive some way to avoid knowing that fact.

Again you're trying to overlook the fact of ruling-class domination over the working class, by emphasizing the schism between equity capital and rentier capital, when both in fact exploit the laborer, by exploitation of labor value, and by living costs deducted from wages, respectively.

The "producer" (owner) does not actually *produce*, because that productivity is due to *labor-power*. Ownership of capital itself is *non-productive*, but is socially *organizing*, under capitalism.

Truth To Power wrote:It has nothing to do with inflation, which is a monetary phenomenon. Keynesian demand-side measures are just a band-aid solution, because they do not address the real barrier to production: the need for producers to pay rent seekers just for PERMISSION to produce.

See -- this is just a ruling-class *schismatic* concern, of equity capital in relation to rentier capital. You're not addressing the *class division* whatsoever, of capital versus labor, with your particular ideology / dogmatism / political theory.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:Rather, demand-side enabling is what *everyone* seeks after -- look at *military* Keynesianism, for example, wherein the military-industrial complex is *enabled* by government largesse, and the result *is* the mass consumption of warfare hardware -- military syndicalism without concerns over pricing inflation.

Truth To Power wrote:Liberty and justice enables both supply and demand. Enabling demand without freeing supply from rent seekers just gives more money to the privileged who profit by REDUCING supply.

You're unable to address the point -- when it comes to the *military* sector there's no real *inflation*, as would be expected from such military-Keynesianist measures, because the formal valuation of military items is considered to be *valid* deficit-spending that helps to boost the overall economy, in contrast to Keynesianism for human needs, like government spending on *social services*.

So this has to do with government *policy* -- relatively *subjective*, political-type valuations -- regarding what kind of government deficit spending helps to boost the economy.

Military Keynesianism is the position that government should raise military spending to boost economic growth. The term is often used pejoratively to refer to politicians who apparently reject Keynesian economics, but use Keynesian arguments in support of excessive military spending.[1][2][3]

The third differentiation starts from the observation that modern capitalist economies do not function as closed systems but rely on foreign trade and exports as outlets for the sale of a part of their surplus. This general observation applies to the surplus generated in the military sector as well. As the vast amount of data regarding state promotion of arms' exports do confirm, capitalist states actively try to ensure that their armament corporations gain access to import orders from foreign states, and they do so amongst others in order to generate multiplier effects. Hence, there is a need to also differentiate between the two forms of domestic and 'externalized' military Keynesianism.[1]

Liberty and justice would benefit from a *democratization* of economics, including that of government spending trajectories, instead of the way it is now, determined by the government ethos of 'national security' that confers greater valuations onto military spending than for government spending that benefits the people's health and welfare.

]]>2019-04-06T13:00:53+01:002019-04-06T13:00:53+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=14997775#p14997775QatzelOk wrote:Opaquing its own inner workings is what all commercial media does for its capitalist owners and advertisers. It's called "muddying the waters" or "creating ignorance."

Creating ignorance is something that tyrants do, not respectable and sustainable social institutions.

Likewise, "branding" is basically a way of replacing something true with something that is a lie. This is why I don't waste too much time on the empty emotional one-liners of many posters. They're just sarcastially refuting "smart ideas" with the fabricated ignorance they are exposed to all day on Netflix or listening to commercial radio in the car and at malls.

Not worth fighting each battle. Much more efficient to analyse and explain the process of ignorance-ification.

Yup, agreed.

SSDR wrote:@ckaihatsu No one is being insulted. You believe that because you have Christian values.

Actually, I've *never* been religious. I got into atheism as an early teenager and have found religion and its rituals to be quaint and anachronistic, at best.

]]>2019-04-05T20:41:44+01:002019-04-05T20:41:44+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=14997670#p14997670ckaihatsu wrote:In this particular instance the deterioration of prevailing / accepted theory was in this focus on 'marginalism', which only deals with *post-manufacture / -production* exchange-values, and which completely ignores the role of labor in the *making* of that pricing / valuation / production process.

No. The neoclassical impoverishment of economic theory lay in its gleeful adoption of Marx's impoverishment of economic theory: refusal to distinguish between land and capital goods.

TTP objects to the privatization of *land*, but that's about it

Right, because it deprives people of what they would otherwise have: their liberty to support themselves by using what was already there, with no help from any self-styled landowner or anyone else.

-- private control of the means of mass industrial production slides right on through, somehow being implicitly okayed by TTP's arbitrary discernment,

Right, because it doesn't deprive anyone of anything they would otherwise have. If you don't like a factory owner's offer to let you use the capital goods he is contributing to enhance your productivity, fine, don't accept it. He will leave you alone. The landowner, by contrast, won't leave you alone if you try to exercise your liberty right to use the natural resources neither he nor any previous landowner contributed.

Like capitalists, socialists like you just refuse to know the difference between the factory owner and the landowner. It's the same error, just made for the opposite reason.

when it's these modern production goods (factories) themselves that are the unresolved economic question of our age.

Nope. It's privilege -- legal entitlements to benefit from the abrogation of others' rights without making just compensation -- that are the unrecognized economic CRIME of our age.

TTP obviously / apparently wants to *dictate*

No, I only identify the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality and their inescapable logical implications. You are either willing to know those facts and their implications, or you aren't. You aren't. Simple.

the limits of theoretical discernment and reformism, to leave *factories* within the sphere of private property,

Because it doesn't harm anyone else.

under the cover of

If there's one thing you cannot accuse me of, it is doing anything under cover.

bashing historically-aristocratic claims to the land itself, a practice that continues to exist today, mostly, as the form of *rentier* capital, or non-productive assets.

No, it's the owner of land who is unproductive, not the asset -- in contrast to the factory owner, without whose contribution the factory would not exist.

What liberals and right-wingers don't understand -- or willingly *refuse* to understand

You are the very last person on earth who can accuse anyone else of refusal to understand, as that is effectively your ONLY method of argument or thought.

-- is that valid valuations must be based on *labor*,

Nope. Value is simply what a thing would trade for, so there is no a priori relationship to labor. Value is simply where utility (demand) and scarcity (supply) meet. THAT'S ALL. The Marxist Labor Theory of Value is objectively incorrect, as Jevons showed nearly 150 years ago, because it transposes the cause and the effect. Things do not have value because labor is devoted to their production; rather, labor is devoted to production of things to the extent that they are expected to have value.

since everything useful to humanity was initially *created* by labor efforts,

Nope. That is just another bald falsehood from you. The earth was not created by labor efforts, yet humanity can only exist by using it. Your whole absurd Marxist belief system is based on such objectively and provably false claims.

so any system or approach that measures formal value at the *pricing* stage isn't even *looking at* the process of production / creation by which a valuation could be made from *pre-existing* inputs of value, like from lower-level / raw commodities (natural resources), from labor value, and also from capital investments, *before* the finished commodity is put into the market context, for pricing and sale.

Your "argument" consists of nothing but your blank refusal to know the fact that value is what a thing would trade for, which depends ONLY on the combination of utility (demand) and scarcity (supply). We devote labor to producing things because we think they will be both scarce and useful. But it is not the labor that makes them scarce and useful. Indeed, the labor of producing them makes them LESS scarce, and thus REDUCES their value. Marxist claptrap is the exact, diametric opposite of the truth.

Exploiting the masses' *labor-power*, that is.

Silly Marxist garbage.

Yup, it's reductionist Western bourgeois science, applied to the world's human society, ideologically and dogmatically, no matter what damaging social results emerge as a consequence.

See above -- you're only objecting to critiques of bourgeois-norm *market pricing*, while ignoring the value of labor inputs into the creation / production of the commodity in the first place.

Labor inputs do not determine utility and scarcity, and thus do not determine value.

Natural resources are actually *not* fixed

Of course they are: their supply cannot be augmented by labor, and does not respond to price.

-- more exploration into the crust reveals more petroleum (hydrocarbon) and natural gas deposits, for example, contrary to the recurring 'peak oil' hypothesis.

The resource was already there. Discovery is not production: all it does is improve the discoverer's own knowledge. You know this.

You're showing your ideological bent,

No, I am identifying the self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality that you have to refuse to know, because you have already realized that they prove your beliefs are false and evil.

that of 'incentivizing the capital owner', which is just 'trickle-down' / supply-side economics, a contrived justification for the prevailing bourgeois practice of rewarding wealth with more wealth in an erroneous ideological "motivation" to spur new investments of capital within an already-glutted market / social-reality.

Another false claim from you. Trickle down economics was contrived as a disingenuous justification for rent seeking and leaving rent income untaxed. The producer's right to own his product in fact does NOT reward wealth with more wealth. It rewards PRODUCTION with more wealth. You just have to contrive some way to avoid knowing that fact.

This, too, is just a continuation of your ideological clinging -- you're positing that Keynesian-type, demand-side enabling (through greater mass availability of currency face-values) will just come back to bite everyone in the ass because of *inflation* from that mass distribution of currency, but there's no evidence for this contention.

It has nothing to do with inflation, which is a monetary phenomenon. Keynesian demand-side measures are just a band-aid solution, because they do not address the real barrier to production: the need for producers to pay rent seekers just for PERMISSION to produce.

Rather, demand-side enabling is what *everyone* seeks after -- look at *military* Keynesianism, for example, wherein the military-industrial complex is *enabled* by government largesse, and the result *is* the mass consumption of warfare hardware -- military syndicalism without concerns over pricing inflation.

Liberty and justice enables both supply and demand. Enabling demand without freeing supply from rent seekers just gives more money to the privileged who profit by REDUCING supply.

]]>2019-04-05T17:58:46+01:002019-04-05T17:58:46+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=14997657#p14997657ckaihatsu wrote:I agree that the historic turn to a 'neoclassical' worldview of economics was basically just a marketing maneuver, or 'rebranding'. We could also term it 'capitalist revisionism', in which the capitalist analysis of itself begins to deteriorate, in its own subjective self-interested functioning, since it has an objective interest in *opaquing* its own inner workings.

Opaquing its own inner workings is what all commercial media does for its capitalist owners and advertisers. It's called "muddying the waters" or "creating ignorance."

Creating ignorance is something that tyrants do, not respectable and sustainable social institutions.

Likewise, "branding" is basically a way of replacing something true with something that is a lie. This is why I don't waste too much time on the empty emotional one-liners of many posters. They're just sarcastially refuting "smart ideas" with the fabricated ignorance they are exposed to all day on Netflix or listening to commercial radio in the car and at malls.

Not worth fighting each battle. Much more efficient to analyse and explain the process of ignorance-ification.

But economics actually has many areas and no, not all variants of economics are anti-social.

Only those which are popular in academics. The socalled "neoclassics".

I think this facet of the topic was covered early-on in the thread:

QatzelOk wrote:Of course, it was difficult to sweep away classical ideas about collective well being and morality. So the neo-Classicists used marketing to brand their ideology as "new and improved."

Truth To Power wrote:The neoclassicals did adopt one distinct improvement over classical economics: the Marginal Theory of Value to replace the Labor Theory of Value, which Jevons had disproved in 1871. Classical economics focused on production, and saw that while the worker and factory owner contribute to it, the landowner does not. Neoclassical economics focuses on exchange "at the margin," and the assumption that as both sides gain by consensual exchange, the landowner, banker, IP monopolist, etc. must somehow be making others better off in return for their incomes. It therefore ignores the fact that the landowner, banker, IP monopolist, etc. obtained what they exchange with others through a non-consensual conversion of others' rights to liberty into their private property.

I agree that the historic turn to a 'neoclassical' worldview of economics was basically just a marketing maneuver, or 'rebranding'. We could also term it 'capitalist revisionism', in which the capitalist analysis of itself begins to deteriorate, in its own subjective self-interested functioning, since it has an objective interest in *opaquing* its own inner workings.

In this particular instance the deterioration of prevailing / accepted theory was in this focus on 'marginalism', which only deals with *post-manufacture / -production* exchange-values, and which completely ignores the role of labor in the *making* of that pricing / valuation / production process.

TTP objects to the privatization of *land*, but that's about it -- private control of the means of mass industrial production slides right on through, somehow being implicitly okayed by TTP's arbitrary discernment, when it's these modern production goods (factories) themselves that are the unresolved economic question of our age.

TTP obviously / apparently wants to *dictate* the limits of theoretical discernment and reformism, to leave *factories* within the sphere of private property, under the cover of bashing historically-aristocratic claims to the land itself, a practice that continues to exist today, mostly, as the form of *rentier* capital, or non-productive assets.

---

Negotiator wrote:Karl Marx for example is probably the most important economist of all times and he's not even teached to academics at all. Keynes is at best suppressed, there are a few keynesians like Paul Krugman, but they are rare. Adam Smith is hugely distorted, too, he never used the argument of the "invisible hand" the way its told to us.

In fact when I got into economics, I was surprised how super social economics actually is. For example the best way to distribute wealth ? Give everyone the same amount. Hu ! Thats a direct demand of Jesus, of the bible. Thats communism ! And its a logical consequence of economics. Even right-wing economists agree to that the maximum demand (and thus lowest unemployment and highest productivity) is reached if the income of people is as equal as possible.

The rich...are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition.

On the historic empirical facts, you're correct, Negotiator, but in political *principle* you're appearing to be a *liberal*, in your capitalist, exchange-value-based 'give everyone the same amount' type of reform-advocacy.

What liberals and right-wingers don't understand -- or willingly *refuse* to understand -- is that valid valuations must be based on *labor*, since everything useful to humanity was initially *created* by labor efforts, so any system or approach that measures formal value at the *pricing* stage isn't even *looking at* the process of production / creation by which a valuation could be made from *pre-existing* inputs of value, like from lower-level / raw commodities (natural resources), from labor value, and also from capital investments, *before* the finished commodity is put into the market context, for pricing and sale.

Negotiator wrote:Well, at least the actually relevant, famous right-wing economists say so. Those who for example also dont ever agreed that there shouldnt be a inheritance tax. Many current economists however say so. Which gives us the root of the problem of the field.

So what are neoclassics ? They are basically like physicists who have stopped at Newton, misinterpret Newton, and regard Einstein, Heisenberg etc as largely irrelevant. Yes its exactly that level of crazy.

Yup.

Negotiator wrote:A natural science wouldnt tolerate such intellectual idiocy, ever, because they have no motivation to do so. But this is economics, a social science. Whats the dominant theory there is decided by who gives the money.

Yup.

Negotiator wrote:Surprise ! Ultimately, rich people do. And they want the kind of economy that supports them exploiting the masses.

Exploiting the masses' *labor-power*, that is.

Negotiator wrote:Another surprise ! For an economy to do so, it has to be anti-social.

Good point. The ruling-class strategy in-play is 'divide-and-conquer', all the way down to the hyper-individuation of people, into atomization and alienation, just as hyper-commodified as any tech gadget or other object.

Negotiator wrote:Thats the core problem of political economy. Its not neutral. It touches interests of the people in power, who dont like to hear certain things. And thats why the field is so anti-social.

Yup, it's reductionist Western bourgeois science, applied to the world's human society, ideologically and dogmatically, no matter what damaging social results emerge as a consequence.

Truth To Power wrote:Marx was not an economist, just a polemicist. In fact, he took economics a giant step backwards by erasing the distinction between land and capital that was a cornerstone of classical economics. Neoclassical economists, recognizing how convenient it was to their agenda, seized on Marx's error and made it a cornerstone of their own nonscience.

See above -- you're only objecting to critiques of bourgeois-norm *market pricing*, while ignoring the value of labor inputs into the creation / production of the commodity in the first place.

Truth To Power wrote:Smith is overrated. He learned most of his economics at Turgot's knee. But he was a better writer than other economists.

That's only true if the amount of wealth is fixed, like natural resources. If you want people to produce wealth, the best way to "distribute" it is to leave the products of labor in their producers' hands, as that is the most accurate incentive schedule.

Natural resources are actually *not* fixed -- more exploration into the crust reveals more petroleum (hydrocarbon) and natural gas deposits, for example, contrary to the recurring 'peak oil' hypothesis.

You're showing your ideological bent, that of 'incentivizing the capital owner', which is just 'trickle-down' / supply-side economics, a contrived justification for the prevailing bourgeois practice of rewarding wealth with more wealth in an erroneous ideological "motivation" to spur new investments of capital within an already-glutted market / social-reality.

---

Negotiator wrote:Even right-wing economists agree to that the maximum demand (and thus lowest unemployment and highest productivity) is reached if the income of people is as equal as possible.

Truth To Power wrote:Maximum demand now at the expense of less production later is not much of a policy.

This, too, is just a continuation of your ideological clinging -- you're positing that Keynesian-type, demand-side enabling (through greater mass availability of currency face-values) will just come back to bite everyone in the ass because of *inflation* from that mass distribution of currency, but there's no evidence for this contention.

Rather, demand-side enabling is what *everyone* seeks after -- look at *military* Keynesianism, for example, wherein the military-industrial complex is *enabled* by government largesse, and the result *is* the mass consumption of warfare hardware -- military syndicalism without concerns over pricing inflation.

Truth To Power wrote:No, neoclassical economists are actually more like physicists who misrepresent and reject Newton and Einstein in favor of Aristotle and Velikovsky.

Yes, economics is the original home of inconvenient truths, and neoclassical economics the largely successful effort to erase them.

SSDR wrote:@Stardust You don't need to believe anything. It is irrelevant.

]]>2019-04-04T22:44:23+01:002019-04-04T22:44:23+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=14997516#p14997516Statistics: Posted by SSDR — 04 Apr 2019 22:44
]]>2019-04-03T20:27:38+01:002019-04-03T20:27:38+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=14997305#p14997305Negotiator wrote:Karl Marx for example is probably the most important economist of all times and he's not even teached to academics at all.

Marx was not an economist, just a polemicist. In fact, he took economics a giant step backwards by erasing the distinction between land and capital that was a cornerstone of classical economics. Neoclassical economists, recognizing how convenient it was to their agenda, seized on Marx's error and made it a cornerstone of their own nonscience.

Adam Smith is hugely distorted, too, he never used the argument of the "invisible hand" the way its told to us.

Smith is overrated. He learned most of his economics at Turgot's knee. But he was a better writer than other economists.

For example the best way to distribute wealth ? Give everyone the same amount. Hu ! Thats a direct demand of Jesus, of the bible. Thats communism !

That's only true if the amount of wealth is fixed, like natural resources. If you want people to produce wealth, the best way to "distribute" it is to leave the products of labor in their producers' hands, as that is the most accurate incentive schedule.

Even right-wing economists agree to that the maximum demand (and thus lowest unemployment and highest productivity) is reached if the income of people is as equal as possible.

Maximum demand now at the expense of less production later is not much of a policy.

So what are neoclassics ? They are basically like physicists who have stopped at Newton, misinterpret Newton, and regard Einstein, Heisenberg etc as largely irrelevant. Yes its exactly that level of crazy.

No, neoclassical economists are actually more like physicists who misrepresent and reject Newton and Einstein in favor of Aristotle and Velikovsky.

Thats the core problem of political economy. Its not neutral. It touches interests of the people in power, who dont like to hear certain things. And thats why the field is so anti-social.

Yes, economics is the original home of inconvenient truths, and neoclassical economics the largely successful effort to erase them.

But economics actually has many areas and no, not all variants of economics are anti-social.

Only those which are popular in academics. The socalled "neoclassics".

Karl Marx for example is probably the most important economist of all times and he's not even teached to academics at all. Keynes is at best suppressed, there are a few keynesians like Paul Krugman, but they are rare. Adam Smith is hugely distorted, too, he never used the argument of the "invisible hand" the way its told to us.

In fact when I got into economics, I was surprised how super social economics actually is. For example the best way to distribute wealth ? Give everyone the same amount. Hu ! Thats a direct demand of Jesus, of the bible. Thats communism ! And its a logical consequence of economics. Even right-wing economists agree to that the maximum demand (and thus lowest unemployment and highest productivity) is reached if the income of people is as equal as possible.

Well, at least the actually relevant, famous right-wing economists say so. Those who for example also dont ever agreed that there shouldnt be a inheritance tax. Many current economists however say so. Which gives us the root of the problem of the field.

So what are neoclassics ? They are basically like physicists who have stopped at Newton, misinterpret Newton, and regard Einstein, Heisenberg etc as largely irrelevant. Yes its exactly that level of crazy. A natural science wouldnt tolerate such intellectual idiocy, ever, because they have no motivation to do so. But this is economics, a social science. Whats the dominant theory there is decided by who gives the money.

Surprise ! Ultimately, rich people do. And they want the kind of economy that supports them exploiting the masses.

Another surprise ! For an economy to do so, it has to be anti-social.

Thats the core problem of political economy. Its not neutral. It touches interests of the people in power, who dont like to hear certain things. And thats why the field is so anti-social.

]]>2019-04-02T16:12:51+01:002019-04-02T16:12:51+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176242&p=14997069#p14997069And in the interim, the New Keynesian heavies have been out in force embarrassing themselves – Krugman, ‘Mr Spreadsheet’ Rogoff, Summers and more – all rushing to [the] join the conga line of critics.. . . All essentially following the same pattern – little citation, false constructions, idiotic inferences.. . . We are (hopefully) witnessing what a degenerative paradigm (in the meaning that Imre Lakatos gave to that term) looks like as it declines into oblivion.

The babbitts can perpetuate a degenerate paradigm indefinitely, they just gang up and takeover the institutions and their zombie theories continue to stagger on eating the brains of one generation after the next.

]]>2019-04-02T15:16:44+01:002019-04-02T15:16:44+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=14997061#p14997061Truth To Power wrote:Yes, it has. It got cause and effect backwards, as Jevons showed.

You're ideologically trying to assert that capital is necessary -- and is even the driving force of production -- when it's not because *labor* is required to enact any type of productivity, goods or services.

Further, capital is no longer *logistically* necessary for production, because workers can *collectivize* all productive implements the world over, using communications technology, and can coordinate over the kinds of production (networked supply chains) for each, filling in *consciously* over how machinery is to be used, for social need (free-access and direct-distribution), rather than leaving such to the *hands-off* *market* mechanism (the 'invisible hand').

Truth To Power wrote:No. You are again just factually incorrect. The wages of labor are its product.

No, you're ignoring the *industry* that the workers are in -- if it's the *textile* industry, for example, then the workers there make *fabric*, up to the finished product of *clothing* (or whatever).

It's the *goods or services* that workers produce, and the wage is usually so insufficient that the workers can't even buy the products that they're making. That shows you that there's a big *discrepancy* between what the workers are given for their labor, and what the products of their labor are sold for on the market.

Truth To Power wrote:Sometimes that is enough to sustain the worker, sometimes it isn’t; sometimes it is more than enough. But none of those has anything to do with “socially necessary” things or the “sustainability” of labor. Market wages are determined by the Law of Rent, and have nothing to do with what the worker needs in order to live and work another day.

No, the 'law of rent', whatever that is, is *not* directly deterministic on what wages are paid out, as you erroneously claim. You're trying to assert some kind of fixed principle here, when in fact wages vary and are specific to the management decisions of each particular company, in various industries.

'Socially necessary' production is that production which is *objectively required* by workers, for their own consumption for their own life and living, and the continuation of the labor commodity going-forward ('sustainability').

Truth To Power wrote:See? Just like capitalists, socialists refuse to know the difference between owning something you have contributed – capital -- and owning something of which you only deprive others, and demand that they pay you merely for your PERMISSION to use, like land.

You're mixing contexts here -- you're trying to blame socialists for the different types of capital, equity and rentier. Socialism is a *political* approach, mainly to government / administration of society, while you're citing an empirical feature of existing capitalist production, somehow in an attempt to slight the political position of socialism. It makes no sense.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong again. Wages are determined by what labor produces on marginal land (see the Law of Rent). The employer has no way to get any more than that from the worker, who can just leave and take up some marginal land of his own, and the worker no reason to accept any less. This was demonstrated conclusively by Ricardo more than 200 years ago and is not seriously disputed by any competent economist.

Your conception of society and its political dynamics is woefully out-of-date -- these days we're in the era of *industrial* production, and what counts isn't the *land* so much as the *industrial equipment* used for the sake of production. Just consider the automotive or computer industries, which are vastly complex, and rely on sophisticated supply-chains, and robotic automation, for the products that they produce, cars and computers. Your erroneous 'land' argument is thoroughly, demonstrably misguided in the overall context of our contemporary world.

You seem to think that everything still takes place manually on *prairies* or something.

Truth To Power wrote:Huh?? You have not even offered an argument about value, which is what something would trade for. Jevons refuted the LTV in 1871 when he showed that the LTV is a delusion that has cause and effect reversed: labor does not cause value in its product; rather, producers devote labor to producing a product until the marginal labor cost is equal to the marginal exchange value of that product.

You're betraying your own argument since you're acknowledging that there's labor cost inherent to the productive process. *Of course* labor has value because it's been formally *commodified* under capitalism -- quantitatively it's the amount of *wages* paid-out. The employer enjoys a *profit* on this employment of human labor because the products (goods and/or services) produced by hired workers are sold on the market for more than it took to produce them, otherwise the investment of capital wouldn't be worth it, for just breaking-even. (Also note the historical tendency for the rate of profit to *decline*.)

Labor value theory simply looks at the productive process from the perspective of the *laborer*, in seeing what the costs are there in *maintaining* the same quantity of labor-power going-forward (whether unskilled or skilled). Anything *above* the threshold of this maintenance of labor-power is called 'surplus labor value', and that's what the capitalist *expropriates* for private gain ('profit'). (See the 'Business' diagram from my previous post.)

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ckaihatsu wrote:'Social production' denotes the meaning of 'What the people of a society require for their consumption for their organic and social sustainability.'

Truth To Power wrote:Which unfortunately does not refer to anything in the real world. What they “require” has nothing to do with what is produced by private effort, which could be any amount more or less than that.

Yes, workers need *food* and *shelter*, etc., for the continuation of their role as workers, otherwise they won't be able to free up their daytime for the sake of laboring at a workplace.

'Private effort' doesn't produce *shit* -- it's the *workers* who are the ones doing the producing. Under capitalism capital ownership and its right to exploit labor are backed up *by the state*, including with violence.

Truth To Power wrote:Right: I am stating indisputable empirical facts of objective physical reality that disprove your false and evil beliefs, and I am not altering or evading them to help you preserve those beliefs.

No, again, I don't *have* beliefs -- I'm making statements based on how the world actually functions, without being false or evil, nor altering anything, nor evading anything.

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ckaihatsu wrote:you seem to politically *support* private-property rights and the private-property bourgeois rights to private control over (mass industrial) production.

Truth To Power wrote:Right: I support private ownership of and control over what is privately produced until such time as it is bought by a public authority at market value.

That's not going to happen -- the workers of the world have no reason to *respect* your so-called 'private ownership'. The means of mass industrial production need to be *seized* by the working class, otherwise workers will never be able to collectively *control* the same.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong again. Like property in land, “intellectual property” is a privilege by definition -- a legal entitlement to benefit from the abrogation of others’ rights without making just compensation -- and is a component of the capitalist power structure because unlike private ownership of factories and other products of labor, it deprives people of access to economic opportunity they would otherwise enjoy.

So you don't recognize 'intellectual property' as being valid? Under capitalism there are certainly *private costs* inherently associated with the *development* of certain kinds of knowledge -- 'research and development' (R&D) -- and your political theory has no way of *addressing* these kinds of private costs, as in the practice of existing 'intellectual property'. It's a sinkhole in your overall politics. You seem to think that intellectual property should be paid-for *privately* while being made accessible *publicly*, which is *socialism* over intellectual property.

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Truth To Power wrote:Actually, this history was well explained decades ago by Mason Gaffney in "The Corruption of Economics."

This goes back more than a century to JB Clark's "The Distribution of Wealth," the founding document of neoclassical economics, in which he stated explicitly that his purpose was to show that all legally obtained wealth is obtained by making an equivalent contribution to production. I.e., that a return obtained through legal entitlement to DEPRIVE others of what they would otherwise have is economically the same as a return obtained by PROVIDING them with what they would NOT otherwise have. I.e., that economics cannot make any distinction between production and legalized theft.

ckaihatsu wrote:This bourgeois-economics line is so disingenuous that it quickly gets tangled up in its own 'supply-side' contrivances -- it's simply an attempt to justify capital's role in productive activity while shunting labor's role to the side, to make it invisible in the same process.

Truth To Power wrote:Do socialists really think such nonsense constitutes an argument?

ckaihatsu wrote:Well who still believes in 'trickle-down' / supply-side arguments, aside from those elites who actually benefit from it?

The problem of income inequality isn't with 'supply' issues, because capitalist commodity production actually tends towards *overproduction* -- the problem is in how markets *distribute* the products of commodity production, which is to-those-who-can-afford-them, and not to those who may happen to have real organic and social *unmet needs* for such products.

Truth To Power wrote:Supply side arguments are typically rationalizations for subsidizing rent seeking, which does not increase supply, not arguments for letting producers keep the value of their products, which does.

Okay, but which *is* it, then -- ?

By touting your anti-government-interference line there would be no *regulations* on the functioning of the economy, which means that labor would be allowed to be exploited *even more* than it already is, which would be a 'legalized theft' of what its product is worth on the market. (Recall that anything not-paid to labor is by definition a *capital* cost, such as for private infrastructure, equipment, etc. If one eliminates all government regulations, such as for a minimum wage, then labor will be paid in wages *even less* than it's already paid for its labor-power, thus exploiting it even more.)

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ckaihatsu wrote:The problem of income inequality isn't with 'supply' issues, because capitalist commodity production actually tends towards *overproduction* -- the problem is in how markets *distribute* the products of commodity production, which is to-those-who-can-afford-them, and not to those who may happen to have real organic and social *unmet needs* for such products.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong again. The problem of excessive (and unjust) inequality of wealth, income and condition under capitalism is that purchasing power is not distributed by a market process at all, but by a political one: government issue and enforcement of privileges such as land titles, bank licenses and IP monopolies. If people had their rights to liberty, and did not have to pay privilege owners full market value just for PERMISSION to have a job and a home, to go shopping, to access public services and infrastructure, to participate in the economy and culture, etc., they would almost all be able to earn AND KEEP not only enough to support themselves and their families but far more than that in a market-based private production economy.

You're being *contradictory* again -- why should the current markets for job-employment, home-having, food shopping (etc.), and public services and infrastructure, be *subsidized* by the state, as you're implying (since the private sector wouldn't be paying for it, and neither would it be a cost to the consumer) -- ?

So do you tout non-government-interference, or do you *support* government intervention in all sectors that experience 'market failure' (as for full-employment, housing, food, public services, public infrastructure) -- ?

Your contradictory political basis is making you sound like a typical politician during election season, talking out of both sides of their mouth, making empty promises to the electorate that they'll never keep once elected.

Truth To Power wrote:But it only allocates resources efficiently and relieves scarcity if it does, because socialism ALSO distributes purchasing power by a political process rather than a market one. The difference is that when socialists steal producer goods, it reduces the amount of those goods available for production, while when capitalists steal land, the amount of land available for production stays exactly the same. That is why capitalism systematically outperforms socialism.

You're erroneously equating socialism with historical *Stalinism*, when Stalinism was actually the result of an implicit *compromise* between the Bolshevik Revolution, as mitigated by Western imperialism. (No Bolshevik was *ever* advocating for nation-state-bound *Stalinism* -- rather, that's simply what historically *emerged* from competing forces.)

Also note that market dependence only succeeds in terms of its own abstracted *market values* -- factors like organic / social human *need* are considered as 'externalities' and are not taken-into-account, even if people wind up *starving* due to materially-preventable famine and its knock-on effects. Fewer consumers means a *strengthening* of the nationalist exchange values / currency, or *deflation* / value-appreciation, as we're seeing today.

A socialist-type *planned* economy can formally *politicize* factors like human need, bringing such into the consciously-planning process, something that the market mechanism *cannot* do since it *externalizes* such human costs off of the formal balance-sheet, inherently.

When capitalists have stolen land it was part of the *capitalization* / commodification historical process, out of preceding *feudal* relations, making it historically *progressive*, for that time. Now that we're fully into a commodity-based capitalist system its past socially-progressive quality has far outlived its historical / social usefulness, and that's why many all over the world are socialists, agitating for a *contemporization* of prevailing politics, to shift power to the workers who are the essential component of contemporary mass-industrial production.

Truth To Power wrote:False. I just understand why socialism is even worse than capitalism (see above), and why socialists’ ignorance, stupidity and dishonesty has been an even bigger barrier to achievement of liberty, justice and prosperity for workers than capitalists’ ignorance, stupidity and dishonesty.

Again you're conflating socialism with (historical) *Stalinism*, which is incorrect and inappropriate.

See 'The Communist Manifesto', and also my own developed framework for a feasible post-capitalist communist-type material-economic functioning:

Truth To Power wrote:I do what I can. Meanwhile, I think it will be valuable to deprive the capitalist power structure of the easy target of socialism, so they have to face the real challenge: liberty, justice, and truth. Socialism is a distraction that helps capitalists pretend there is no other alternative to capitalism. Just as you falsely accuse me of advocating in capitalism order to avoid addressing the facts I identify, capitalists falsely accuse me of advocating socialism for the same purpose.

You're obviously not-realizing that your set of touted politics is *not* something that's oriented towards 'liberty, justice, and truth' -- rather, it's ideological for the small-scale scope because you're a *propertarian* who's living in the past. We're *not* in 1776, we're in 2019, and we're in a *mass industrial age* of material production.

Socialism may be demonized but that doesn't make it any less *appropriate* or relevant to the existing world situation at-hand.

Sounds like you're stuck in-between, ideologically -- small-scale agrarian ownership is your ideological worldview, and it is no longer how meaningful production is done these days.

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ckaihatsu wrote:The term 'contribution' connotes some kind of charity, and that's the meaning of the term that I was critiquing.

Truth To Power wrote:Get a better dictionary. It means something supplied to a common effort, project or fund. In this case, that common effort is production of goods and services to increase the supply available for consumption and relieve scarcity.

But here's the thing: the benefits of capitalist production are inherently *privatized*, so it's *not* for a 'common effort, project, or fund' -- or, rather, any such 'commonness' of production is *incidental*, because the *real* benefits are *privatized*, in the form of *profits*. 'Supply' only caters to those who can *pay* for it, under capitalism, with 'human need' as an *externality*, well off the balance sheet.

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ckaihatsu wrote:Also, due to the labor theory of value,

Truth To Power wrote:Which has been proved false, remember.

Nope -- see above, where I address it.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong again. Unlike the landowner, who has forcibly appropriated what others would otherwise have been at liberty to use, there is no reason to believe a factory owner has stolen anything from anyone. He simply contributes the factory (which but for his contribution would not have existed) to the production process, offering the workers access to opportunity they would not otherwise have. Unlike the landowner, the factory owner has no legal power to take from anyone anything they would otherwise have.

Well, sure, in the equity-capital-versus-rentier-capital schism I'm on the side of *equity* capital since it does lend itself to varied production, unlike the feudal-like *rentier capital* functioning.

But *both* types of capital still *exploit* the labor class since wages are *decreased* by life-necessary payments for goods and services, and also for paying rent for housing.

Also your ideology repeatly implies that all land would still be 'the commons' for everyone if only it weren't for the dastardly private ownership of *land* -- which is yet *another* contradiction in your position. Which is it, should land be privately owned, or shouldn't it be? If not, then why stop at land? Why not expand such a socialist-type application to productive goods (factories) and all commodities in total?

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ckaihatsu wrote:Nope -- this is where your conception / politics is *flawed* -- capital and labor cannot be considered as rough *equivalents* just because they're both involved in the de-facto capitalistic productive process, at times to supply to social necessity.

Truth To Power wrote:“Social necessity” has nothing to do with it. Capital goods and labor are similar in that those who contribute them provide something that, unlike land, would not otherwise have been available to the production process.

I *get* it -- you favor equity capital over rentier capital, which is fine. But what *I* was establishing is that there are different types of *production* within capitalism, that of social-necessity-vs.-luxury-production. Luxury production happens to be *more profitable*, but it's *socially* *unnecessary*, because it doesn't supply for basic human needs, like food and shelter.

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ckaihatsu wrote:Labor is different because it has *organic* and social requirements for material *consumption* (food, shelter, etc.), whereas capital does not.

Truth To Power wrote:That is objectively false. Capital goods must first be produced, and if not maintained and protected, will deteriorate and become useless. It just takes longer for a machine to rust than for a worker to starve.

Your claims are OBJECTIVELY FALSE. OBJECTIVELY.

If I'm so "wrong" then what would you say about *financial* goods like equity capital? If enough of it is invested then its inherent costs will be paid-for by the *banking institution*, not to mention its present-day *miniturization* into electrical impulses through computer circuitry and as magnetic traces on hard drives, etc.

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ckaihatsu wrote:Capital can just sit around and receive rent and interest payments for its sheer existence, with negligible costs, if any, involved.

Truth To Power wrote:Your claims continue to be objectively false. Unlike land, capital must first be PRODUCED by its initial owner, and will decay over time unless maintained and protected. It is LAND that can just sit around.

Truth To Power wrote:NO. Your claims continue to be objectively false. Capital goods yield no rent because unlike land they would not otherwise be available for use, and because unlike land their supply will be increased until any excess return is competed away.

Your claims are OBJECTIVELY FALSE. OBJECTIVELY.

Truth To Power wrote:That is again just another bald falsehood from you. It is LAND that has no production or maintenance cost, not capital goods. It is LAND that is eternal and will still be available for use into the indefinite future, not capital goods.

Your claims are OBJECTIVELY FALSE. OBJECTIVELY.

I thought you were *against* rentier-type capital -- why are you now *defending* it?

ckaihatsu wrote:In this way we can call workers 'wage slaves' because they *must* receive wages, for their life and living, and social reproduction going-forward, whereas capital *has no* such requirements.

Truth To Power wrote:Wrong again. If capital goods are not used productively enough to repay their cost of production and maintenance, plus a premium for the risk the owner takes in deferring his consumption to produce, maintain and allocate them, they will not be replaced, and future production will have to do without them, and society will suffer the consequent decrease in supply and aggravated scarcity of goods and services.

You realize that this argument of yours entirely rests on the *quantity* of the capital in question, right?

All you're doing is effectively saying that 'Smaller capital concerns won't be nearly as competitive as larger capital concerns'.

You're not even addressing my point, which is about the material social status of *workers*.

Truth To Power wrote:It is indisputably personal, and the owner of capital goods indisputably offers workers access to economic opportunity they would not otherwise have.

Again you're making a strawman-type dichotomy in which either it's capitalism or an outer-space-like *void* for workers. It really mirrors the White-Man's-Burden kind of argument in that without the "generosity" of the ruling class people would otherwise have to starve to death while sitting on their hands.

You're just supplying propaganda for the sake of the ruling class, which doesn't cut it here.

Truth To Power wrote:The fact that he depends on workers for his livelihood is utterly irrelevant to the economic opportunity he provides to them which they would not otherwise have, just as the fact that a baker is reliant on his customers for his livelihood is irrelevant to the fact that he provides them with the opportunity to eat bread that they would not otherwise have.

This is 100% patronizing because it's the *workers* who do the actual work of baking bread or whatever -- workers could certainly produce and exist without the bosses, but the bosses could not exist without the labor of the workers.

Truth To Power wrote:No, it is about the fact that the capital owner offers them an opportunity to earn wages that they would not otherwise have, while the privilege owner DEPRIVES them of opportunity to earn wages that they WOULD otherwise have. It is the LANDOWNER who imposes necessity on the worker, whose liberty to support himself the landowner forcibly removes, and it is the CAPITAL owner who RESCUES the worker from destitution by providing him with the opportunity to earn wages. Socialism consists in blaming the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker; capitalism consists in blaming the worker for it. But both are stupid, evil, vicious, despicable lies.

No, you can't just blame this on rentier-type land ownership -- what you're ignoring is that the equity owner *also* exploits the worker, through the process of production, by expropriating surplus labor value.

Blaming the equity-capital owner is *not* equivalent to blaming the worker -- again, the worker is *compelled* to work for the necessities of life and living, while the capital owner has an obvious *surplus* of wealth compared to his or her *personal* needs for life and living.

Truth To Power wrote:No it doesn’t. The landowner benefits more from capital than either the worker or the capital owner -- even Marx came to understand that, though far too late in life to correct his false beliefs (it’s in Volume III of “Capital,” which Marx did not finish before he died) -- but that does not alter the fact that the capital owner provides the worker with economic opportunity he would not otherwise have. Real economic opportunity is about nothing but having access to better economic options: the privilege owner DEPRIVES the worker of access to economic options he would otherwise have, the capital owner PROVIDES the worker with access to economic options he would NOT otherwise have. It’s that simple, no matter how much you try to evade it.

*You're* the one who's trying to make it seem like there are no alternatives -- the alternative available to the worker is that of *proletarian revolution* because it's through labor that the factories were built (and other profit-making equipment) so that production can take place at all.

The productive equipment must be *seized* by the collective working class so that it can be controlled *in common*, while displacing private property ownership altogether.

Truth To Power wrote:The capital owner (employer) has no power to expropriate anything from anyone, only the privilege owner does.

Incorrect -- you can't just focus blame on aristocratic-like rentier ownership, while equity ownership is just as exploitative to the workers' labor-power. (See previous points, above.)

Truth To Power wrote:If the worker’s wages are unjustly low, it is only because the LANDOWNER has forcibly stripped him of his liberty to pursue other options, and thus of his bargaining power.

You're still erroneously making it sound as though land is *everything*, when these days it's the *means of mass industrial production* (factories) that are what's at stake -- just compare a simple land owner to that of a factory owner, and see which has more productive capacity, along with the greater potential for profit-making.

Truth To Power wrote:Your bone-headed Marxist “exploitation” nonsense is logically equivalent to claiming that in cities where Uber is not permitted to compete with licensed taxis, and taxi fares are consequently high and taxi licenses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, the high cost of taxi fare is exploitation of riders by the cab DRIVERS, rather than by the government that privileges the license owners and the license owners who pocket the monopoly rents.

It's not nonsense and you're limiting your argument to a *services* example only -- people require *goods* more than they do on *services* for their life and living, and more competition in the private sector is *not* the solution to the unavailability of needed goods and services by the underpaid and exploited working class.

Truth To Power wrote:This is PROVED by the fact that most employers/capital owners, far from extracting any “surplus labor value” from their workers, instead go bankrupt. Unlike landowners and taxi license owners, capital goods owners have to COMPETE, and their returns are competed away. Only the most skilful, diligent and productive (and lucky) manage to make any significant profits over and above their own wages without the help of monopoly privilege.

Yes, surplus labor value is extracted from workers, beyond the labor value that they / we need to live and reproduce their collective labor-power. Workers aren't given the full value of what the products of their labor are sold for on the market, because doing so would eat up the profits of the capital owners and disincentivize them from being involved in the productive process. That's why workers have to control production for themselves / ourselves, which includes *seizing* productive infrastructure that currently exists.

Truth To Power wrote:You are dishonestly trying to evade again by changing the subject. It would be just as absurd, fallacious and disingenuous to claim that giving bikes to children does not provide them with opportunity because some of the kids who get bikes will be hit by cars. Such disingenuous “arguments” are just outrageous and despicable. Sorry, but getting an opportunity to work does not mean all risk is somehow removed from that opportunity and the work is somehow made perfectly safe.

So then you're *acknowledging* that workers get killed on-the-job. This reality *cuts against* any 'opportunity' narrative that you're arguing for. And the very *necessity* to work *somewhere* means that workers are objectively *compelled* to take-up this risk of death or else not be able to obtain a wage at all.

Truth To Power wrote:No, that is another bald fabrication on your part. Land rent proves it is not all the same.

Of course: that’s why the factory owners were willing to pay the landowners a premium for permission to use those locations. Duh.

So then you're admitting that production-enabled (factory) land is more materially and economically *productive* than rentier-type land. Once that land is paid-for and fully owned by the factory owner the land seller no longer has any claim to it and becomes irrelevant to the factory's operation and competitive private stake, including the current and future exploitation of workers' surplus labor value. (You're *not* acknowledging that workers are exploited, as proven by profit-making on the part of the capital owner. If they simply broke-even then we could say that the workers and bosses are roughly economically equivalent within the productive process.)

Truth To Power wrote:No, that is just another bald falsehood. Equities are ownership shares of enterprises, which are created to make profits in various ways that usually involve owning assets, including any combination of capital goods, privileges and production systems.

You're making my argument *for* me -- you're just listing different kinds of capital / private ownership, which are all economically equivalent because they all exploit labor for a profit.

Truth To Power wrote:Nonsense. The capital owner has no power to exploit workers, only to offer them access to opportunity, like a cab driver offering to take a passenger to his destination.

*Of course* it's labor exploitation, because that's the source of the profit-making. No profits = no exploitation.

Your taxi scenario has to do with a *customer*, and not a worker. (Recall that a worker is *compelled* to work, for the necessities of life and living, while a customer may or may *not* be purchasing socially-necessary goods and services -- any necessary transportation could be had for far cheaper than a discretionary, luxury-like cab ride.)

Truth To Power wrote:Socialists see the passenger paying the cab driver an exorbitant fare, and conclude that it is the DRIVER doing the exploiting, and not the license owner or the government. It is just blank refusal to see any but the most superficial aspects of economic relationships.

Socialism isn't concerned with capitalist government regulations, if any, because such is merely reformism *within* the paradigm of capitalism, which is beside-the-point of workers collective control of production, including potential cab-ride services. But, yes, I'll agree that larger, corporate interests are involved in any commodity production, within contemporary capitalism.

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ckaihatsu wrote:'Offering people access to economic opportunity' is still *spinning* the concept in favor of *ownership* interests,

Truth To Power wrote:No, it is identifying the relevant facts.

No, you're showing an ideological *interpretation* of the productive process within capitalism, and you're definitely biased towards the interests of capital ownership with your 'employment is opportunity' line, plus your rare mention of workers at all.

Truth To Power wrote:<sigh> Do you imagine that unemployment continues to exist because employers/capital owners don’t have any work for the unemployed to do that is productive enough to pay a living wage? Or can you find a willingness to know the fact that some workers are not productive enough to both support themselves AND pay landowners full market value just for PERMISSION to work?

This is more clear evidence of your class bias -- 'permission' implies 'power', which obviously resides with the bosses, and not with the workers.

Job roles are contingent on *market conditions* which means that even if people need work, for wages, for living, they're not *guaranteed* such because the market may not necessarily need their offered labor-commodity at that particular moment, thereby leaving them without any income.

Truth To Power wrote:Yes, of course there is: the state of nature, in which our hunter-gatherer ancestors existed for millions of years.

Now you're *really* behind-the-times, and ethically cruel, to boot, with this line -- why should capital owners get the benefits of modern lifestyles while out-of-work workers are expected to live like prehistoric hunter-and-gatherers, in the midst of numerous and enforced modern-day private-property claims?

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ckaihatsu wrote:[C]apital *depends* on labor and its exploitation for the functioning of its capitalist system.

Truth To Power wrote:What an absurd and disingenuous load of garbage. Do you really think the fact that the baker depends on his customers for his livelihood means there is no default situation in which he does not bake bread, and his prospective customers consequently don’t have an opportunity to buy it??? REALLY?? Give your head a shake.

Screw you -- again you're ignoring the role of the workers, which are the *actual* people behind the baking of the bread. You're continuing to live in a retro mom-and-pop fantasy.

Truth To Power wrote:They have stolen your intellectual integrity, as amply proved by your posts in this thread, and if you have lived under socialism (which you obviously haven’t), you would know that they also stole some portion of the fruits of your labor.

"They" -- ? Who's "they" -- ? I speak for myself.

And, again -- Stalinism isn't socialism.

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ckaihatsu wrote:unlike my past employers --

Truth To Power wrote:A few employers are certainly dishonest and steal from workers; but the mere fact that you worked for someone does not mean they stole anything from you. Why did you agree to work for them if you thought they were stealing from you?

Labor exploitation is regular, systematic theft of work-product. I needed the wages money for my own survival, so it was one employer exploiting me every hour, or another.

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ckaihatsu wrote:you're implying *criminality* here, which is an untrue stereotyping of socialist politics.

Truth To Power wrote:No it’s not. See every single socialist economy in history where government has imposed socialism by force.

You're *yet again* confusing Stalinism for socialism -- workers weren't in control of production then so it *wasn't* socialism.

Truth To Power wrote:BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA!! I guess that must be why they almost never bother to own any such goods, except for their own consumption or as part of a corporation that makes almost all its profits by dint of privilege, and merely needs to deploy some capital goods in order to do it.

See -- you're describing the interests of capital, just in different forms. There may be some *schisms* within your private-property camp, but the capitalist government certainly defends the institution of private property on the whole. You're just crying 'sour grapes' because you defend the little guy in the face of the contemporary corporate form, which happens to benefit *consumers* more than your favored small-scale tyrannical form does. (So the corporation is the best *organization* of production under capitalism, to-date, though not to defend it -- corporations should be taken over by the workers and run in workers' best interests.)

Truth To Power wrote:<sigh> I guess that must explain why almost all employers/capital goods owners who don’t also own rent collection privileges go bankrupt...

Oh, you're looking to explain that equity owners take a 'risk' when they invest their capital, but this is 'internal' to capitalism and makes no difference one way or the other to *workers* interests, due to the class divide.

Truth To Power wrote:Who deprived them of access to the means of life and living in the first place, stripping them of their options and bargaining power so that they had to offer their labor to employers/capital goods owners on unfavorable terms, hmmmmmmmmm? Who?

Blank out.

You're not getting it -- 'deprived' is the *default* state of things because anything and everything that's *valuable* has already been claimed by one private party or another. Children have to depend on their families for what they need, and adults have to work and earn a wage if they're to make ends meet.

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ckaihatsu wrote:Here's the *point* -- you're dogmatically and erroneously attached to this idea that the sum total of the world economy's exchange-values (asset valuations) somehow neatly lines-up to the world's sum total of people / population, and that it never *expands*.

Truth To Power wrote:No, that is just you makin’ $#!+ up again. I have said no such thing.

Well, you haven't acknowledged that economies fluctuate and grow over the timescales of centuries. Here's a graph:

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Truth To Power wrote:Everyone has access to ownership of capital goods... if they can just pay landowners for permission to produce them.

Do you mean through *loans* -- ? Then such doesn't count, because such investors are *obligated* to provide a return on those loans, which certainly isn't a *given*, as you yourself noted above ('risk').

You can't continue to pretend that *land* ownership is the basis of all subsequent valuations, as for production goods (factories).

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ckaihatsu wrote:You're not acknowledging that the world economy *expands*, sometimes in line with world population growth, sometimes *lagging behind* world population growth (effectively a *shrinking* of the world economy, per capita), and sometimes *outpacing* world population growth, meaning that more value is put into circulation, per-capita.

Truth To Power wrote:You are makin’ $#!+ up again.

No, you're protecting your bullshit sectarian intellectual 'turf' with your willing ignorance and pretending that economics isn't a *social* invention, and should ultimately be at the service of *human beings*, meaning all people on the globe.

Since you're not-acknowledging that the global capitalist economy *grows* over historical time, you're implicitly pretending that the economy is *static* over time, which it isn't.

Truth To Power wrote:No, it’s not relevant, because it does not relate to any fact I have identified.

You're dismissing my 'Pies Must Line Up' graphic because you don't want to accept that a global economy should ultimately be of *utility* (usefulness) to people, instead of being *detached* from billions of people due to its over-valuedness in advanced countries due to Western imperialism.

What good is a global economy if its existence and viability inherently rests on the capitalist protection racket -- including the threat of warfare -- from leading empires like that of the U.S.? You're showing yourself to be an *elitist* if you think that the global capitalist economy should exist regardless of whether it's actually of-service to people or not.

Truth To Power wrote:Your views are nothing but subjective beliefs unsupported by fact.

Have I been going on-and-on here about any 'subjective beliefs' or opinions? No, I've been providing good arguments based on how the world (social reality) operates. You're calling my points 'subjective' *only* because they're from the point of view of *labor*, and not from the point of view of *capital ownership*.

ckaihatsu wrote:TTP's interpretation of Clark posits this Mad-Max competitive arena in which everything material is gained from the *blood* of others, apparently, while blithely ignoring that everything materially meaningful is actually derived from the planet's *natural resources*, requiring *labor* to fashion it all appropriately for human usage.

Truth To Power wrote:That is self-evidently false. Natural resources must ALREADY be -- and are -- appropriate for human use BEFORE labor can do anything with them. This is self-evident and indisputable. You just have to find some way of not knowing it, because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

ckaihatsu wrote:How, then, can you explain the existence of a common *table* -- ? Tables don't grow in nature, they have to be designed and fashioned from *wood* from *trees*, which *do* grow from nature, and require human labor-power for their manufacture.

Truth To Power wrote:A table is a product of labor. Naturally growing trees are not. I’m not sure which part of that you are having so much trouble understanding.

So then you're finally *admitting* that commodities don't come fully-made from nature, and that human *labor* is required to turn a tree into a table, for example.

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ckaihatsu wrote:Ditto for any other human-used goods or services. Even taking anything 'finished' from nature, like agricultural goods, requires human labor for the sake of *removing* it from nature and *transporting* it to the end-user / consumer.

Truth To Power wrote:Agriculture implies a product of human labor, in contrast to the produce of the hunter-gatherer which is removed from nature by labor, even if it is just the labor of plucking fruit to eat it from the hand.

Good contrasting examples -- hunter-gatherers existed *before* the class division, so, as you're noting, labor was mostly hand-to-mouth, within relatively *simple* structures of social organization. But under capitalism's commodity-production labor is used on *gigantic* scales of international organization, yielding *tremendous* productivity, as for food production.

You're again finally acknowledging that *all* commodities require the input of human *labor* to turn natural resources into commodities, under capitalism.

Truth To Power wrote:I have stated that capitalist private property in privilege is invalid.

I'll translate this as 'Government over the landscape of private property claims, if any, should be fair and balanced even though the competing claims of various private parties (as within a single industry, like furniture, for example) are mutually exclusive, up to the scale of competing nation-states which will use machinery of mass killing to physically subdue their opponents in international warfare (the world wars of the 20th century).'

By only critiquing *land* ownership you're oversimplifying *all* private property ownership, which is an empirical dog-eat-dog economic landscape that's historically resulted in the killing of *millions* of people internationally. (It would be better for a nation to have a relatively *small* area of land but with much private *weapons* ownership, than for a country to have a *large* area of land, but with relatively *few* weapons to use in international warfare.)

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ckaihatsu wrote:this is what happens as a result -- you're unable to distinguish the private ownership of land from the private ownership of production goods (factories).

Truth To Power wrote:No, I am the one who makes that distinction very clearly and precisely, as all readers of this thread including you know very well; socialists like you are the ones who pretend they are the same, and that there is no difference between the capital goods owner offering workers access to economic opportunity they would not otherwise have and the landowner DEPRIVING them of access to economic opportunity they WOULD otherwise have. See my comprehensive and conclusive demolition of your “arguments” above.

You're *again* defending capitalism solely based on its component of *equity capital* while ignoring that equity capital can only operate by finding *employees* / workers to exploit, for every hour of work. Recall the 'tables' example above where you acknowledged that:

Truth To Power wrote:A table is a product of labor.

I'll generalize this to 'Every commodity is a product of labor.'

So it's not the equity capital *solely* that's enabling the production of commodities -- it also requires *labor* for the actual physical creation of those saleable commodities. Capital just functions as a form of *social organization* (through the markets) for such, which is *not* the same as the actual *making* of those commodities, by labor, as you've acknowledged.

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ckaihatsu wrote:Your critique of land-only implies that people could still privately own *factories*, but on de-privatized land, which would result in a paradigm that's hardly different from what we have today, *with* private ownership of land.

Truth To Power wrote:False. It would mean 20%-40% of GDP (depending on the country) going to producers – almost all of it to working people -- in return for their contributions to production rather than to landowners in return for nothing. It would mean dramatically lower prices for almost everything, especially housing, and a far more internationally competitive economy. It would mean many public services and infrastructure projects that are currently “unaffordable” because their value has to be given away to landowners in return for nothing would become affordable. The potential benefits are immense.

So if the de-privatization of land is such a good thing, why stop *there* -- ?

Why not press for the collectivization of production goods (factories), as well?

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ckaihatsu wrote:Those who could afford to buy equities / factories would, and would seek to *monopolize* each particular industry that they produce for, using the exploitation of labor.

Truth To Power wrote:They couldn’t, because nothing – no PRIVILEGE -- would stop others from competing with them.

Okay, so instead of capitalist government playing 'referee' and backing the interests of a monopoly to monopolize over an industry, what if those competing private interests just simply bought their own weaponry and had a small or large *war* over their respective claims to turf? No government = no referee, which means a return to a dog-eat-dog landscape of competing private claims.

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ckaihatsu wrote:This is why the *revolutionary* position makes sense, because it calls for the *overthrow* of *all* private property ownership, so that the *workers* control what's produced for societal consumption, and what's not.

Truth To Power wrote:Workers’ interests do not align with society’s interests for the exact same reason corporations’ interests do not align with society’s interests: workers and corporations benefit if their products are in short supply, but society benefits if they are abundant.

Certainly -- I *agree* with this distinction you're making, and I've sorted through the inherent interests of [1] workers, [2] consumers, and [3] social administration, in a potential post-capitalist society:

In this way the labor credits framework has a dynamic of checks-and-balances among the three 'realms' of inherently different objective interests in a post-capitalist socio-political-material environment -- that of [1] liberated labor for more control, and even hegemony, over the social productive process, that of [2] mass consumption for easy / free access to satisfy any and all personal needs imaginable, and [3] administrative interests in institutionally overseeing all aspects of the material-economic world, as over all production and consumption, liberated-labor and all implements of mass production.

Here's an excerpt from the 'introduction' blog entry:

If *liberated-labor* is too empowered it would probably lead to materialistic factionalism -- like a bad syndicalism -- and back into separatist claims of private property.

If *mass demand* is too empowered it would probably lead back to a clever system of exploitation, wherein labor would cease to retain control over the implements of mass production.

And, if the *administration* of it all is too specialized and detached we would have the phenomenon of Stalinism, or bureaucratic elitism and party favoritism.

...Some of the readily apparent *checks-and-balances* dynamics enabled with the labor-credits system are:

- (Already mentioned) One could work for personal material-economic gains -- the amassing of labor credits -- instead of having to 'like' *both* the socio-political aspect *and* the personal-material-economic aspect of one's work within a strictly-voluntaristic, non-labor-credit, communistic-type political economy. (Individual vs. socio-political realms)

- The contribution of one's potential liberated labor to societal objectives would always be fully optional, since the premise of a communist-type social order is that no one could ever be *actually* coerced for their labor since the ubiquitous norm would be that no productive machinery or natural resources in the world could be used on a *proprietary* / private-accumulation basis, while all the material necessities for life and living would always be in readily-available, sufficient quantities for all. Collective social productivity would be *very good* using post-capitalist, communist-type liberated-labor self-organizing, leveraged with full automation of all productive processes, for *huge* ratios of industrial mass-production output, per hour of liberated labor input. (Individual vs. socio-political and material realms)

- Mass demand, as displayed publicly, per-locality, by the daily mass-aggregated tallied rank positions (#1, #2, #3, etc.), will always be an existing social-pressure, specifically regarding liberated labor contributions to the general social good for varying qualities of public consumption. Such active liberated labor may or may not receive labor credits for their valid efforts, depending on such general *implementation* of circulating labor credits, or not, and the specifics of any active policy package. (Socio-political and material realms vs. individuals)

- Active liberated-labor would control all *ultimate* ('point-of-production') productivity for society, but *not-necessarily-working* people of any intra-voluntary collective 'locality' (or localities) could make and agree-on proposals and final policy packages that contain great *specificity*, as over *exactly* who (which persons) are to be included as active liberated-labor, and also their respective rates of labor credits per hour per discrete work role, and each worker's particular work schedule, as a part of the overall project scheduling. (Consumers vs. liberated-labor)

- Any intra-voluntary 'locality' could collectively develop and agree-on any particular proposal or final policy package, with specifics over staffing, rates of labor credits per included work role, and work schedules for all work roles / liberated-laborers, but if the liberated-labor-internal social process *did not approve* of the terms for any given proposal or policy package they would not *forfeit* their collective control over the implements of mass industrial production as a result -- realistically the result would most-likely be a *devolving* of larger-scale work organizing, since no agreement was reached between mass-demand and self-organized liberated-labor. Production could still take place on any ad-hoc basis, with liberated labor always getting 'first dibs' on anything they themselves produce, but it would be far more small-scale, localized, and balkanized than if larger-scale, multi-locality proposals and policy packages could be realized, for material economies of scale. (Liberated-labor vs. consumers)

- Any given finalized policy package will include a formal announcement of key proponents, politically responsible for that project's implementation, if satisfactory participation to cover all the necessary components of it is present. There is never any *standing*, *institutional* administration over everything, as we're used to seeing historically at the nationalist level. If a project *isn't* performing up to formal expectations (as detailed in its policy package), the proponents can be replaced with a mass-approved (exceeding in ranking over the initial policy package) proposal that 'tweaks' those details that need changing, such as which personnel, exactly, are deemed to be the formal 'proponents' of that project. (Consumers vs. administration)

- Proponents of any given active finalized policy package would have considerable logistical social latitude for administrating over its implementation, depending-on / limited-by its finalized detailed terms. In some instances, for example, proponents over *several* localities, of several *similar* policy packages -- say, over agriculture -- or even at regional, continental, and *global* scales -- may cross-coordinate to *generalize* production across many similar policy packages, for the sake of greater efficiencies of scale. (Administration vs. consumers)

- Proponents are meant to represent the exact terms of an active finalized policy package, and by extension, to also represent popular demand for certain material production and/or socio-political initiatives. Proponents may bring attention to certain aspects of the active finalized policy package in the course of its implementation, as with any possible differences on the part of active liberated-labor on the project. (Administration vs. liberated-labor)

- Liberated-labor will always be able to physically organize internally, without external interference. Depending on each active finalized policy package's provisions, liberated laborers may decide on their own the details of *how* they collectively supply their labor, to meet the objectives of that policy package -- as with specific personnel of their own, which work roles are absolutely necessary, the scheduling of work shifts and personnel, what geographical location(s) are to be used, how machinery is to be used, what the supply chains with other factories are, how the bulk-pooled labor credits funding is to be divided-up, if any additional funding of labor credits is needed, or even if locality debt issuances for additional labor credits are to be called-for, what maintenance may be needed on infrastructure / machinery, what education or training may be required for certain workers, etc. (Liberated-labor vs. administration)

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ckaihatsu wrote:The problem with your propertarian politics

Truth To Power wrote:That is an absurd and disingenuous mischaracterization of my views. Propertarians say, “property, right or wrong,” and often only grudgingly concede that chattel slavery is not rightful – some even claim it is! I advocate restricting property to the products of labor, and abolishing all property in privilege.

Okay, noted, and I'd like to know if production goods (factories) would be considered as 'private property' within your politics, or not. (Factories are physically the products of labor, after all.)

As long as *exchange values* continue to exist there will be competing claims to ownership of the means of mass industrial production -- resolvable only by conflict and warfare among the competing private interests.

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ckaihatsu wrote:is that you're ignoring the *role of labor* --

Truth To Power wrote:Again, that is a bald falsehood on your part. I am very clear on the role of labor. YOU merely deny that the owner of capital goods is making any contribution to production.

Yes, I'm a Marxist, and so I do reject that equity capital (and rentier capital, too, for that matter) is making any contribution to production -- rather, private ownership is more of a type of *social organization*, through competing monetary claims, as to the ownership of this-or-that productive asset. If one owner of capital couldn't succeed in securing a productive property, then another one will, so that ultimately there's a certain private interest in the ownership position of that factory or whatever.

These machinations, up to inter-imperialist warfare, are of *zero* concern to workers interests for their / our own collective control of all social production.

Truth To Power wrote:Whether it is for sale or consumption by the producer is irrelevant to the fact that production is the source of rightful property because it relieves scarcity. It does not deprive anyone else of anything they would otherwise have. Privilege, by contrast, such as landowning, INFLICTS scarcity on others, depriving them of what they WOULD otherwise have.

Okay, I understand your line, but I'd still like to know if factories would be privately owned or not within the politics that you advocate.

Truth To Power wrote:Labor EARNS property in its product. Whether that product is then devoted to production or not, it is still rightly owned by its producer (or anyone who has bought it from its producer in consensual exchange).

So you do *defend* private property ownership of the means of mass industrial production -- you're ideologically a capitalist, then.

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ckaihatsu wrote:Labor is treated as a *commodity*, like any other,

Truth To Power wrote:Nope. Wrong. Commodities have no brand value. Each person’ labor, by contrast, is unique. If you had ever been an employer/capital goods owner, you would know that. Indeed, I’m surprised that you claim to have held a job at some time, yet are nevertheless unaware of it.

It doesn't matter if labor ouput varies person-to-person, because *on the whole* labor / all-workers are still being *commodified* by the process of their selling of their / our own labor-power, or capacity to work.

You're trying to *personalize* an economic dynamic that happens to be *mass*, in scale -- that of labor-selling / employment, and the capitalist *exploitation* of the same.

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ckaihatsu wrote:even though it's *real people* that have to serve the interests of capital for the sake of their / our own life and living,

Truth To Power wrote:They aren’t “serving capital” (whatever that might mean), they are dealing consensually with someone who is offering them opportunity they would not otherwise have, same as buying a loaf of bread from a baker.

Now you're confusing / mixing-up the roles of worker and consumer -- when workers sell their labor to the capitalist for a wage they're serving the interests of capital to make a profit through the production and selling of commodities (goods and/or services).

A capitalist *consumer*, with money-in-hand, is *not* a worker at that moment because they *have* money to spend and are not at that moment selling their labor-power to the capitalist.

You're *trying* to characterize these two different dynamics as both being 'consensual', but they really aren't -- the consumer *has* to get food / nutrients into their body, so they spend money to buy food. That's not consensual, it's biologically *mandatory*. And the worker has to get money so that they can *buy* bread, and they consequently must sell their own capacity to work, to get the wage-money in order to buy bread, to satisfy the same biological imperative.

You keep trying to *personalize* these economic dynamics by calling them 'opportunities', but that's simply how the whole system works (or is dysfunctional), regardless of who this-or-that person happens to be.

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ckaihatsu wrote:from a wage (without receiving the full market value of their labor that they've sold to the employer).

Truth To Power wrote:They are receiving the full market value of their labor from their employer. They just have to pay a landowner full market value for permission to earn it, and then pay taxes to fund the desirable public services and infrastructure they just paid landowners for access to.

No, the worker is *not* receiving the full market value of what their labor produced, because if they did the capitalist would not realize any profits from their investments since business expenses and the cost of labor would eat through those profits -- it would just be an economic pass-through, without profit-making.

You seem to mean that workers are (biologically) obligated to pay rent to a rentier capitalist for housing, plus taxes for public infrastructure and services. Your last part doesn't make any sense because you're mixing-up private property with state ('public') property.

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Truth To Power wrote:Gaffney argues that this self-evidently absurd and dishonest nonsense was a stratagem directed specifically at Henry George and the Single Tax movement, which were then threatening to overturn landowner privilege. I suspect it was more broadly intended to justify -- even sanctify -- rent seeking of all stripes: private commercial banks' money issuance and IP monopolies as well as landowning.

ckaihatsu wrote:This is a bullshit, alarmist exaggerated claim, that a populist-type single-tax on land value would be enough to threaten the institution of private property altogether

Truth To Power wrote:That is another fabrication. It would only threaten -- in fact, remove -- wrongful property in natural resources, not rightful property in the fruits of one's labor.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're just making an unserious facile promise here, based on *nothing*.

Truth To Power wrote:False. I am very serious, and it is based on the facts of objective physical reality that I have identified, and that prove you wrong.

So now -- contradictory to other implications you've made -- you're calling *for* a referee-type role for government, to institute and oversee all private property in land itself.

Again the litmus test is how you would treat production goods (factories) themselves, which *are* the products of labor -- should factories be de-privatized and "returned" to the commons along with all private land ownership?

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ckaihatsu wrote:Just because you frame the ownership of assets as being 'rent collection privileges' doesn't *change* its nature --

Truth To Power wrote:It IDENTIFIES its nature.

You are again trying to pretend there is no difference between collecting rent by legally depriving others of opportunity they would otherwise have, without contributing anything to production, and earning a return by CONTRIBUTING to production, providing others with access to economic opportunity they would NOT otherwise have. You HAVE to contrive some way to prevent yourself from knowing the fact of that difference because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

I'm not arguing *for* the private-property ownership of land -- I'm to the *left* of your politics, meaning that the final full historic ending of feudalism (through the abolishment of rentier-type capital) would be welcome by me as a *reform*, but it wouldn't end capitalism *itself*, because *equity* capital would continue to exist and exploit workers' surplus labor value through the production process.

Truth To Power wrote:No, again that’s just objectively false. Interest is a return proportional to amount and time that is paid for temporary use of another’s purchasing power. Rent is a return obtained by legally depriving others of access to economic opportunity that would otherwise be accessible. In neither case is the return obtained “just because [the asset] exists.” Interest compensates for risk and time preference; rent is only obtained if someone gets permission to access the opportunity.

Yes, I'll readily acknowledge that all rentier-based dynamics have to be facilitated through regular market transactions -- you're too concerned with the *machinations* here, which, again, are of no concern to the worker who *has no* capital to begin with.

Just to confirm, are you calling for the de-privatization of all land, to return it to 'the commons'?

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ckaihatsu wrote:'Equities' more-regularly refers to ownership of a share of capital that's actively used in the production of commodities, for capital gains, by exploiting labor-power.

Truth To Power wrote:No it doesn’t. It has nothing to do with “production of commodities” or “exploiting labor power,” or any other such silly Marxist trash.

I'm not incorrect -- you haven't specified where I'm allegedly wrong.

You've *repeatedly* said that equity capital enables the productive process (unlike rentier capital like land), and that's what I'm saying here as well.

Equity capital *does* exploit labor because if it didn't it wouldn't receive a profit, and would just be an economic pass-through process.

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ckaihatsu wrote:*Of course* capital receives more than it puts-in, otherwise there'd be no economic *incentive* for its involvement -- the gain in value is derived from the economic exploitation of labor ('surplus labor value'), for profits.

Truth To Power wrote:You have it backwards: what would be the incentive for workers to use capital in production if it didn’t contribute more than its return?

Workers don't contribute capital to the production process -- they're / we're putting-in their own *labor power*, in return for a wage, for procurement of the necessities of life and living.

Truth To Power wrote:What would be the point? If the capital goods owner isn’t contributing anything in return for his profits, why do the workers even agree to work for him? Why not just do without the capital and keep the full value of their labor?

It's because of the bourgeois-government-enforced institution of *private property* -- workers can't access the markets, as for food, without having money from wages earned.

What you're indicating is *illegal* under bourgeois law -- the seizing of the means of mass industrial production -- which is why it has to happen at the *broadest* scales possible, meaning internationally, so that workers can collectively realize their / our numbers, over the relatively numerically smaller private ownership elite.

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ckaihatsu wrote:You're trying to make it sound like rentier-type profits are the result of aristocratic-type 'privileges',

Truth To Power wrote:Which is correct. They are. Which is why the rich pursue them so avidly, but have no interest in capital goods except for their own consumption (cars, jets, mansions and what-not).

This is probably / most-likely due to the continuing historical declining rate of profit, meaning that equity capital no longer has the economic clout it once did, as seen now in the rampant *deflation* / overvaluation of assets, which favors the economic faction of *rentier* capital, for returns.

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ckaihatsu wrote:when in this day and age it's sheerly *economic*, with the political superstructure / paradigm existing to *enforce* those bourgeois, capital-based 'rights', with, and up-to *military* force and destruction.

Truth To Power wrote:The “rights” in question are privileges, not property in capital goods, which on average yields little or no return.

I don't think you can validly term such asset ownership as being 'privilege', because that term implies 'by decree', implying an *aristocracy* of some kind, when really it's all just government-backed *capitalism* in play these days -- anyone can buy *any* kind of asset or equity, if they have the money, without needing a title or sinecure.

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ckaihatsu wrote:But market-based 'pricing' is *ignoring* the regular, systematic input of the material *labor* that created the good or service in the first place.

Truth To Power wrote:Because that is what “value” MEANS. No labor at all went into creating land, but its value is nevertheless astronomical.

So you're acknowledging that market pricing is not necessarily reflective of underlying value, or 'social utility'.

In the realm of *equity values*, such can be speculated-on, thereby pushing up face values to astronomical levels, as with the classical example of Dutch tulips in the 17th century:

ckaihatsu wrote:So you're simply anti-aristocratic, which was from a historical reality *centuries* ago.

Truth To Power wrote:Reliance of the rich on privilege -- land titles, bank licenses, IP monopolies, broadcast spectrum allocations, oil and mineral rights, etc. -- for their unearned incomes, wealth and power is still the reality today. If anything, privilege is even more dominant now than it was centuries ago. Certainly land rent has risen as a fraction of the economy, as the astronomical cost of a vacant building lot proves.

So you're admitting to a circular definition between wealth and 'privilege' -- the more wealth one has the more access they'll receive to government favor, which grants them better opportunities to get more wealth, and more access, over and over again. It's not an aristocracy, but it's not far *from* it, either.

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ckaihatsu wrote:The world has since moved to *industrial* production, with the world's commodified workers having a large role in how the machines are run, but without adequate *compensation* for the mass industrial production that they create.

Truth To Power wrote:They can't create $#!+ without the contribution by the owner of capital goods, and their underpayment is the result of the privileged depriving them of their rights to liberty and thus their bargaining power, not the capital goods owner offering them access to opportunity they would not otherwise have.

You're indicating that workers should become capital-owners, or capitalists, and that they're / we're currently being *curtailed* in this direction due to the over-valuation and inaccessibility of *land* due to the prevailing governmental paradigm on this, or legal 'superstructure'.

Again you're touting this false dichotomy, that of rentier-type-owners-vs.-equity-type-owners, yet I've told you already that even equity capital exploits the worker as well, through the expropriation of surplus labor value.

And, also, even if many more workers could individually 'escape' their subsumed position by becoming land owners, there's still the empirical situation of: Who would do the work?

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ckaihatsu wrote:Capital goods play a lesser and lesser role in the capitalist production process the more that technology develops and is relied-upon for the material production of commodities (see the 'Business' diagram, above).

Truth To Power wrote:Huh?? Technology IS capital goods. We can only USE technology BY INVESTING in capital goods. Hello?

You're off on a tangent -- I'm saying that technology / capital goods play a lesser and lesser role in the capitalist production process because the continued investment in such becomes *widespread* among all business competitors in the same industry, transforming those investments *downward*, into *lesser and lesser* valuations, and exposing the role of labor to a much greater extent within that overall context of increasingly-devalued productive assets.

]]>2019-04-02T09:39:05+01:002019-04-02T09:39:05+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176242&p=14997031#p14997031The recent big name crits - Summers, Krugman, Rogoff, Powell - simply seem to be ignorance of what the MMT literature actually says. Powell even admitted unfamiliarity with it, yet felt confident to dismiss it as "just wrong." Says more about them than MMT.

]]>2019-04-02T02:41:14+01:002019-04-02T02:41:14+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176057&p=14996989#p14996989QatzelOk wrote:How far I go hasn't been numberically qualified but it's probably within a short distance of how far you would see the ideal redistribution plan working out. Not a lot of difference.

When I say "reduce their consumption and hoarding," I don't mean to tax a bit of it away. I mean to allow the top earners in a society to earn maybe double or triple what the lowest earners take in. And to limit the number of these people through social policies.

Firstly, thanks for your patience QatzelOk.

Should one assume then, that you’re considering ‘Money’ and ‘exchange values’ as they exist today; to continue within the future socialist society..? Because, that wouldn’t be a genuine socialist society, on the basis that Socialism as defined by its original advocators; should be aiming for the elimination of the classes, and money completely, and therefore, to make the direct access of the goods and services available to the individuals, according to their needs.

QatzelOk wrote:The reason I mention this is because of the slightly different needs and percieved needs of human beings. Any system that doesn't take into consideration the natural and healthy component of slight individual differences in consumption, is doomed to meet with a backlash that is large because... attacking nature. Human nature (though I think this element of human nature is over-represented in current (selfish) economic narratives).

I do agree with you that ‘human nature’ is over-represented in current (selfish) economic narratives. However, when we speak of the differences of the ‘perceived needs’ of human beings; we should consider the same within the ‘social, and the individual circumstances’.

Humans are social and circumstantial beings, and as such their perception on who they are and what they need takes form conditionally over the gradual process of time.Therefore, we should not look at the individuals’ needs in a dogmatic manner, by simply looking and comparing them with each other as ‘they exist’, and reach the conclusion that ‘this’ is the mighty ‘human nature’… as it is; and as it will always be! But rather, we should be looking at / studying them through the tested and proved ‘scientific method’ - from the various angles, within the contexts of biology, their immediate environments, society with all its main components; as well as historically. Then, and only then we’ll be able to understand that; just as anything ‘alive’, change is an important component in making of, and the sustenance of the ‘real and healthy human nature’ reflected in the numerous individuals.

QatzelOk wrote:On the other hand, the means of production, all vital human needs, and the opportunity for health care, housing, education, etc. need to be universal and basically equal.

Sure, we agree on this!

QatzelOk wrote:But I do think that some private entrepreneurs (hotel keepers, jewellers, restaurants, other unnecessary services) could help assuage the peculiar needs of humans that aren't rational, or at least that we don't comprehend as rational.

Or perhaps all of these irrational "occupations" can be eliminated through sharing (hotels, restaurants) and/or education (jewellery).

Well, I wouldn’t say that Hotels and Restaurants are unnecessary, as I should imagine these services will continue to be needed in the future society; though not as regularly as some other vital services. Although, one may rightfully consider any demands for ‘jewelries’ and such; in the category of human’s aesthetic needs and tendencies, naturally variable from person to person; and hence ‘vitally’ unnecessary.

However, within the context of a ’classless’, ‘moneyless’ society; given that the level of productivity has reached as high as that necessary to satisfy humans’ vital and beyond... needs and demands, there will be no issues in the provision of all the goods and services on demand.

All those should be readily available to everyone, as they need and/or wish, i.e. no exception or privileges given to some individuals, or groups of people, on any accounts – nature or else…

]]>2019-04-02T02:14:04+01:002019-04-02T02:14:04+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176342&p=14996985#p14996985quetzalcoatl wrote:Free market economies don't actually exist. Heavy state intervention was both de facto and de jure required to bring about the corporate-controlled oligarchy now in effect. The reason for this is obvious (at least to me). Absence of state regulation does equate to open transparent markets. Indeed, lack of regulation leads inevitably to stratified and ossified markets controlled by a small number of individuals.

I did say "relatively". You are wrong about a "lack of regulation" leading to "stratified" etc because such things can only be created through legislation and certainly require enforcement. You are basically arguing for the Corn Laws but using the arguments of those against them, which is weird to say the least. If you like mercantilism, subsidies for political favourites paid for by raiding those unfavoured by the political elite and legal monopolies maybe you shouldn't use the arguments of those that oppose such things.

quetzalcoatl wrote:What AI will do is (potentially) make whatever form of economic organization we choose more efficient. If we choose a centralized command economy based on WWII, it will facilitate that model. If we choose a centralized command market economy, well we already have that - but AI can make it operate more efficiently. If we choose a free market model, we have to realize it's now impossible given our current legal constraints. We would need extensive legal reform to allow a Hayekian distributed market system room to operate; once implemented, AI could play a role optimising it.

No one with any brains or humanity would choose "centralised command economy" unless they had a world war to fight, even then it probably would be no better for the war effort than a regular economy, regardless at present it does not seem like any world wars are going to appear for just for you.

Legal constraints are mostly air and noise the more legal they are the less they constrain in fact because people just lose respect for it when it multiplies beyond comprehension and reason, even those who soak up a salary to enforce it lose respect and so corruption multiplies. The time probably has come for tidying up the cess pit.

]]>2019-04-02T01:44:51+01:002019-04-02T01:44:51+01:00http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176342&p=14996982#p14996982SolarCross wrote:They aren't polar opposites. Really there is not that much between them but Keynes was around during the Great Recession and that nudged him towards interventionist thinking. Smith stands for a relatively free civilian lead economy and Keynes stands for a relatively regulated bureaucrat lead economy.

AI is going to shake things up a lot and be really disruptive, so there is going to be people like Tucker looking for government to wade in with some interventions and there are going to be people like Shapiro who will think the government will bungle the interventions and it wasn't really necessary anyway because the invisible hand would do better. What else is there?

Free market economies don't actually exist. Heavy state intervention was both de facto and de jure required to bring about the corporate-controlled oligarchy now in effect. The reason for this is obvious (at least to me). Absence of state regulation does equate to open transparent markets. Indeed, lack of regulation leads inevitably to stratified and ossified markets controlled by a small number of individuals.

What AI will do is (potentially) make whatever form of economic organization we choose more efficient. If we choose a centralized command economy based on WWII, it will facilitate that model. If we choose a centralized command market economy, well we already have that - but AI can make it operate more efficiently. If we choose a free market model, we have to realize it's now impossible given our current legal constraints. We would need extensive legal reform to allow a Hayekian distributed market system room to operate; once implemented, AI could play a role optimising it.

?? What on earth do you incorrectly imagine you think you might be talking about? Money is only meaningful in relation to things that aren't money, that money can be used to buy: labor, products, natural resources (land), obligations, etc.

Physical universe. LOL.

<sigh> Workers, products of labor, and natural resources are all part of the physical universe, and all very much of concern to economics. So you are merely making a fool of yourself, here. But that's OK. I am here to help you.

The rest of your post is worthless. You don't even know the basics of economics.

BWAHAHHAHAAAAAA!!

That's pretty funny, coming from a clown who doesn't even know that money is only economically meaningful inasmuch as it can be used to buy things in the physical universe that aren't money.

Labor needs to sustain itself for decades, generations, centuries, and millenia into the future otherwise it won't exist to do the socially necessary things that society needs from it. This continued sustainability requires a certain material cost, usually known as 'wages'.

No. You are again just factually incorrect. The wages of labor are its product. Sometimes that is enough to sustain the worker, sometimes it isn’t; sometimes it is more than enough. But none of those has anything to do with “socially necessary” things or the “sustainability” of labor. Market wages are determined by the Law of Rent, and have nothing to do with what the worker needs in order to live and work another day.

But the ownership class

See? Just like capitalists, socialists refuse to know the difference between owning something you have contributed – capital -- and owning something of which you only deprive others, and demand that they pay you merely for your PERMISSION to use, like land.

does not simply hand-down the full labor value, in wages, of what that labor-power, and its products, are sold for on the market. Instead it keeps the 'surplus labor value', beyond the straightforward costs of what labor requires to reproduce itself, going-forward.

Wrong again. Wages are determined by what labor produces on marginal land (see the Law of Rent). The employer has no way to get any more than that from the worker, who can just leave and take up some marginal land of his own, and the worker no reason to accept any less. This was demonstrated conclusively by Ricardo more than 200 years ago and is not seriously disputed by any competent economist.

So the labor theory of value has *not* been refuted.

Huh?? You have not even offered an argument about value, which is what something would trade for. Jevons refuted the LTV in 1871 when he showed that the LTV is a delusion that has cause and effect reversed: labor does not cause value in its product; rather, producers devote labor to producing a product until the marginal labor cost is equal to the marginal exchange value of that product.

'Social production' denotes the meaning of 'What the people of a society require for their consumption for their organic and social sustainability.'

Which unfortunately does not refer to anything in the real world. What they “require” has nothing to do with what is produced by private effort, which could be any amount more or less than that.

You're making an empirical description here with no critique

Right: I am stating indisputable empirical facts of objective physical reality that disprove your false and evil beliefs, and I am not altering or evading them to help you preserve those beliefs.

-- you seem to politically *support* private-property rights and the private-property bourgeois rights to private control over (mass industrial) production.

Right: I support private ownership of and control over what is privately produced until such time as it is bought by a public authority at market value.

A "privilege" -- ? No, it's better-described as a component of bourgeois ruling-class superstructural *hegemony*, or a service to a certain kind of property owner, that of 'intellectual property'.

Wrong again. Like property in land, “intellectual property” is a privilege by definition -- a legal entitlement to benefit from the abrogation of others’ rights without making just compensation -- and is a component of the capitalist power structure because unlike private ownership of factories and other products of labor, it deprives people of access to economic opportunity they would otherwise enjoy.

Well who still believes in 'trickle-down' / supply-side arguments, aside from those elites who actually benefit from it?

Supply side arguments are typically rationalizations for subsidizing rent seeking, which does not increase supply, not arguments for letting producers keep the value of their products, which does.

The problem of income inequality isn't with 'supply' issues, because capitalist commodity production actually tends towards *overproduction* -- the problem is in how markets *distribute* the products of commodity production, which is to-those-who-can-afford-them, and not to those who may happen to have real organic and social *unmet needs* for such products.

Wrong again. The problem of excessive (and unjust) inequality of wealth, income and condition under capitalism is that purchasing power is not distributed by a market process at all, but by a political one: government issue and enforcement of privileges such as land titles, bank licenses and IP monopolies. If people had their rights to liberty, and did not have to pay privilege owners full market value just for PERMISSION to have a job and a home, to go shopping, to access public services and infrastructure, to participate in the economy and culture, etc., they would almost all be able to earn AND KEEP not only enough to support themselves and their families but far more than that in a market-based private production economy.

This is merely *social convention* -- the world's economy doesn't *have* to work on this concept and practice of 'exchange values', including capital / producer goods.

But it only allocates resources efficiently and relieves scarcity if it does, because socialism ALSO distributes purchasing power by a political process rather than a market one. The difference is that when socialists steal producer goods, it reduces the amount of those goods available for production, while when capitalists steal land, the amount of land available for production stays exactly the same. That is why capitalism systematically outperforms socialism.

You're sounding as bad as any capitalist apologist

False. I just understand why socialism is even worse than capitalism (see above), and why socialists’ ignorance, stupidity and dishonesty has been an even bigger barrier to achievement of liberty, justice and prosperity for workers than capitalists’ ignorance, stupidity and dishonesty.

and you're not even holding up your own stated politics of '[speaking] truth to power'.

I do what I can. Meanwhile, I think it will be valuable to deprive the capitalist power structure of the easy target of socialism, so they have to face the real challenge: liberty, justice, and truth. Socialism is a distraction that helps capitalists pretend there is no other alternative to capitalism. Just as you falsely accuse me of advocating capitalism in order to avoid addressing the facts I identify, capitalists falsely accuse me of advocating socialism for the same purpose.

The term 'contribution' connotes some kind of charity, and that's the meaning of the term that I was critiquing.

Get a better dictionary. It means something supplied to a common effort, project or fund. In this case, that common effort is production of goods and services to increase the supply available for consumption and relieve scarcity.

Also, due to the labor theory of value,

Which has been proved false, remember.

the producers are not even so much providing any *material* means, as much as they're displaying their collections of stolen labor value that they have.

Wrong again. Unlike the landowner, who has forcibly appropriated what others would otherwise have been at liberty to use, there is no reason to believe a factory owner has stolen anything from anyone. He simply contributes the factory (which but for his contribution would not have existed) to the production process, offering the workers access to opportunity they would not otherwise have. Unlike the landowner, the factory owner has no legal power to take from anyone anything they would otherwise have.

Nope -- this is where your conception / politics is *flawed* -- capital and labor cannot be considered as rough *equivalents* just because they're both involved in the de-facto capitalistic productive process, at times to supply to social necessity.

“Social necessity” has nothing to do with it. Capital goods and labor are similar in that those who contribute them provide something that, unlike land, would not otherwise have been available to the production process.

Labor is different because it has *organic* and social requirements for material *consumption* (food, shelter, etc.), whereas capital does not.

That is objectively false. Capital goods must first be produced, and if not maintained and protected, will deteriorate and become useless. It just takes longer for a machine to rust than for a worker to starve.

Your claims are OBJECTIVELY FALSE. OBJECTIVELY.

Capital can just sit around

Your claims continue to be objectively false. Unlike land, capital must first be PRODUCED by its initial owner, and will decay over time unless maintained and protected. It is LAND that can just sit around.

and receive rent

NO. Your claims continue to be objectively false. Capital goods yield no rent because unlike land they would not otherwise be available for use, and because unlike land their supply will be increased until any excess return is competed away.

Your claims are OBJECTIVELY FALSE. OBJECTIVELY.

and interest payments for its sheer existence, with negligible costs, if any, involved.

That is again just another bald falsehood from you. It is LAND that has no production or maintenance cost, not capital goods. It is LAND that is eternal and will still be available for use into the indefinite future, not capital goods.

Your claims are OBJECTIVELY FALSE. OBJECTIVELY.

In this way we can call workers 'wage slaves' because they *must* receive wages, for their life and living, and social reproduction going-forward, whereas capital *has no* such requirements.

Wrong again. If capital goods are not used productively enough to repay their cost of production and maintenance, plus a premium for the risk the owner takes in deferring his consumption to produce, maintain and allocate them, they will not be replaced, and future production will have to do without them, and society will suffer the consequent decrease in supply and aggravated scarcity of goods and services.

Economic 'opportunity', as though the capital owner doesn't *depend* on labor-power for the sake of production and profits -- ? You're merely spinning the situation around to make it sound somehow *personal*, when it's *not*.

It is indisputably personal, and the owner of capital goods indisputably offers workers access to economic opportunity they would not otherwise have. The fact that he depends on workers for his livelihood is utterly irrelevant to the economic opportunity he provides to them which they would not otherwise have, just as the fact that a baker is reliant on his customers for his livelihood is irrelevant to the fact that he provides them with the opportunity to eat bread that they would not otherwise have.

People are employed by the billions worldwide as a basic component of capitalism's functioning. This isn't so much about 'opportunity' as it is about *necessity*, since workers require wages as a resource to their adequate life and living.

No, it is about the fact that the capital owner offers them an opportunity to earn wages that they would not otherwise have, while the privilege owner DEPRIVES them of opportunity to earn wages that they WOULD otherwise have. It is the LANDOWNER who imposes necessity on the worker, whose liberty to support himself the landowner forcibly removes, and it is the CAPITAL owner who RESCUES the worker from destitution by providing him with the opportunity to earn wages. Socialism consists in blaming the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker; capitalism consists in blaming the worker for it. But both are stupid, evil, vicious, despicable lies.

Real economic opportunity has to do with who gets to benefit from capital, and why.

No it doesn’t. The landowner benefits more from capital than either the worker or the capital owner -- even Marx came to understand that, though far too late in life to correct his false beliefs (it’s in Volume III of “Capital,” which Marx did not finish before he died) -- but that does not alter the fact that the capital owner provides the worker with economic opportunity he would not otherwise have. Real economic opportunity is about nothing but having access to better economic options: the privilege owner DEPRIVES the worker of access to economic options he would otherwise have, the capital owner PROVIDES the worker with access to economic options he would NOT otherwise have. It’s that simple, no matter how much you try to evade it.

Expolitation is the systematic expropriation of surplus labor value, into private hands, for every hour of work performed (sold) to the employers / bosses.

The capital owner (employer) has no power to expropriate anything from anyone, only the privilege owner does. If the worker’s wages are unjustly low, it is only because the LANDOWNER has forcibly stripped him of his liberty to pursue other options, and thus of his bargaining power. Your bone-headed Marxist “exploitation” nonsense is logically equivalent to claiming that in cities where Uber is not permitted to compete with licensed taxis, and taxi fares are consequently high and taxi licenses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, the high cost of taxi fare is exploitation of riders by the cab DRIVERS, rather than by the government that privileges the license owners and the license owners who pocket the monopoly rents. This is PROVED by the fact that most employers/capital owners, far from extracting any “surplus labor value” from their workers, instead go bankrupt. Unlike landowners and taxi license owners, capital goods owners have to COMPETE, and their returns are competed away. Only the most skilful, diligent and productive (and lucky) manage to make any significant profits over and above their own wages without the help of monopoly privilege.

Tell that to the workers who have lost their lives on-the-job.

You are dishonestly trying to evade again by changing the subject. It would be just as absurd, fallacious and disingenuous to claim that giving bikes to children does not provide them with opportunity because some of the kids who get bikes will be hit by cars. Such disingenuous “arguments” are just outrageous and despicable. Sorry, but getting an opportunity to work does not mean all risk is somehow removed from that opportunity and the work is somehow made perfectly safe.

You're trying to make it sound as though all land is the same --

No, that is another bald fabrication on your part. Land rent proves it is not all the same.

but I think the land that has factories on it has better industrial productive capacities.

Of course: that’s why the factory owners were willing to pay the landowners a premium for permission to use those locations. Duh.

Private ownership of capital goods is the same as 'equities',

No, that is just another bald falsehood. Equities are ownership shares of enterprises, which are created to make profits in various ways that usually involve owning assets, including any combination of capital goods, privileges and production systems.

and can realize profit-making from the process of industrial production, including the systematic exploitation of workers' labor power.

Nonsense. The capital owner has no power to exploit workers, only to offer them access to opportunity, like a cab driver offering to take a passenger to his destination. Socialists see the passenger paying the cab driver an exorbitant fare, and conclude that it is the DRIVER doing the exploiting, and not the license owner or the government. It is just blank refusal to see any but the most superficial aspects of economic relationships.

'Offering people access to economic opportunity' is still *spinning* the concept in favor of *ownership* interests,

No, it is identifying the relevant facts.

because unemployment still continues to exist, exacerbating income inequality, and revealing the class divide.

<sigh> Do you imagine that unemployment continues to exist because employers/capital owners don’t have any work for the unemployed to do that is productive enough to pay a living wage? Or can you find a willingness to know the fact that some workers are not productive enough to both support themselves AND pay landowners full market value just for PERMISSION to work?

Yes, of course there is: the state of nature, in which our hunter-gatherer ancestors existed for millions of years.

since capital *depends* on labor and its exploitation for the functioning of its capitalist system.

What an absurd and disingenuous load of garbage. Do you really think the fact that the baker depends on his customers for his livelihood means there is no default situation in which he does not bake bread, and his prospective customers consequently don’t have an opportunity to buy it??? REALLY?? Give your head a shake.

No socialist has stolen anything from me,

They have stolen your intellectual integrity, as amply proved by your posts in this thread, and if you have lived under socialism (which you obviously haven’t), you would know that they also stole some portion of the fruits of your labor.

unlike my past employers --

A few employers are certainly dishonest and steal from workers; but the mere fact that you worked for someone does not mean they stole anything from you. Why did you agree to work for them if you thought they were stealing from you?

you're implying *criminality* here, which is an untrue stereotyping of socialist politics.

No it’s not. See every single socialist economy in history where government has imposed socialism by force.

Why do you feel you have to make $#!+ up about what I have plainly written?

You're *definitely* an apologist for capitalism --

Again, that is a fabrication on your part.

yes, ownership of capital goods is what the ruling class' interests are,

BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA!! I guess that must be why they almost never bother to own any such goods, except for their own consumption or as part of a corporation that makes almost all its profits by dint of privilege, and merely needs to deploy some capital goods in order to do it.

and is what gives them economic privilege over those who *don't* have capital,

<sigh> I guess that must explain why almost all employers/capital goods owners who don’t also own rent collection privileges go bankrupt...

and who must sell their / our own labor to bosses for a wage, for access to the means of life and living.

Who deprived them of access to the means of life and living in the first place, stripping them of their options and bargaining power so that they had to offer their labor to employers/capital goods owners on unfavorable terms, hmmmmmmmmm? Who?

Blank out.

Here's the *point* -- you're dogmatically and erroneously attached to this idea that the sum total of the world economy's exchange-values (asset valuations) somehow neatly lines-up to the world's sum total of people / population, and that it never *expands*.

No, that is just you makin’ $#!+ up again. I have said no such thing.

By being incorrect you're positing a false material situation for the sake of your dog-eat-dog concept, probably for the sake of guilt-tripping those on the bottom who have never *had* access to any useful ownership of capital.

Everyone has access to ownership of capital goods... if they can just pay landowners for permission to produce them.

You're not acknowledging that the world economy *expands*, sometimes in line with world population growth, sometimes *lagging behind* world population growth (effectively a *shrinking* of the world economy, per capita), and sometimes *outpacing* world population growth, meaning that more value is put into circulation, per-capita.

You are makin’ $#!+ up again.

I happen to have an illustration that's relevant here, an economic critique of Marx's 'labor vouchers' formulation, for the same reason:

No, it’s not relevant, because it does not relate to any fact I have identified.

I don't have any subjective 'beliefs' about any of this stuff.

Your views are nothing but subjective beliefs unsupported by fact.

How, then, can you explain the existence of a common *table* -- ? Tables don't grow in nature, they have to be designed and fashioned from *wood* from *trees*, which *do* grow from nature, and require human labor-power for their manufacture.

A table is a product of labor. Naturally growing trees are not. I’m not sure which part of that you are having so much trouble understanding.

Ditto for any other human-used goods or services. Even taking anything 'finished' from nature, like agricultural goods, requires human labor for the sake of *removing* it from nature and *transporting* it to the end-user / consumer.

Agriculture implies a product of human labor, in contrast to the produce of the hunter-gatherer which is removed from nature by labor, even if it is just the labor of plucking fruit to eat it from the hand.

Well since you're upholding bourgeois private property rights,

I have stated that capitalist private property in privilege is invalid.

this is what happens as a result -- you're unable to distinguish the private ownership of land from the private ownership of production goods (factories).

No, I am the one who makes that distinction very clearly and precisely, as all readers of this thread including you know very well; socialists like you are the ones who pretend they are the same, and that there is no difference between the capital goods owner offering workers access to economic opportunity they would not otherwise have and the landowner DEPRIVING them of access to economic opportunity they WOULD otherwise have. See my comprehensive and conclusive demolition of your “arguments” above.

Your critique of land-only implies that people could still privately own *factories*, but on de-privatized land, which would result in a paradigm that's hardly different from what we have today, *with* private ownership of land.

False. It would mean 20%-40% of GDP (depending on the country) going to producers – almost all of it to working people -- in return for their contributions to production rather than to landowners in return for nothing. It would mean dramatically lower prices for almost everything, especially housing, and a far more internationally competitive economy. It would mean many public services and infrastructure projects that are currently “unaffordable” because their value has to be given away to landowners in return for nothing would become affordable. The potential benefits are immense.

Those who could afford to buy equities / factories would, and would seek to *monopolize* each particular industry that they produce for, using the exploitation of labor.

They couldn’t, because nothing – no PRIVILEGE -- would stop others from competing with them.

This is why the *revolutionary* position makes sense, because it calls for the *overthrow* of *all* private property ownership, so that the *workers* control what's produced for societal consumption, and what's not.

Workers’ interests do not align with society’s interests for the exact same reason corporations’ interests do not align with society’s interests: workers and corporations benefit if their products are in short supply, but society benefits if they are abundant.

The problem with your propertarian politics

That is an absurd and disingenuous mischaracterization of my views. Propertarians say, “property, right or wrong,” and often only grudgingly concede that chattel slavery is not rightful – some even claim it is! I advocate restricting property to the products of labor, and abolishing all property in privilege.

is that you're ignoring the *role of labor* --

Again, that is a bald falsehood on your part. I am very clear on the role of labor. YOU merely deny that the owner of capital goods is making any contribution to production.

natural resources don't *extract themselves* for human usage, it takes human *labor* to do that, thereby *commodifying* whatever natural resources are being extracted from nature, for sale to others.

Whether it is for sale or consumption by the producer is irrelevant to the fact that production is the source of rightful property because it relieves scarcity. It does not deprive anyone else of anything they would otherwise have. Privilege, by contrast, such as landowning, INFLICTS scarcity on others, depriving them of what they WOULD otherwise have.

Labor itself doesn't *require* property, mostly because it doesn't already *own* the means of production that it has to work on, as laborers.

Labor EARNS property in its product. Whether that product is then devoted to production or not, it is still rightly owned by its producer (or anyone who has bought it from its producer in consensual exchange).

Labor is treated as a *commodity*, like any other,

Nope. Wrong. Commodities have no brand value. Each person’ labor, by contrast, is unique. If you had ever been an employer/capital goods owner, you would know that. Indeed, I’m surprised that you claim to have held a job at some time, yet are nevertheless unaware of it.

even though it's *real people* that have to serve the interests of capital for the sake of their / our own life and living,

They aren’t “serving capital” (whatever that might mean), they are dealing consensually with someone who is offering them opportunity they would not otherwise have, same as buying a loaf of bread from a baker.

from a wage (without receiving the full market value of their labor that they've sold to the employer).

They are receiving the full market value of their labor from their employer. They just have to pay a landowner full market value for permission to earn it, and then pay taxes to fund the desirable public services and infrastructure they just paid landowners for access to.

You're just making an unserious facile promise here, based on *nothing*.

False. I am very serious, and it is based on the facts of objective physical reality that I have identified, and that prove you wrong.

Just because you frame the ownership of assets as being 'rent collection privileges' doesn't *change* its nature --

It IDENTIFIES its nature.

it's still ownership of rentier capital,

You are again trying to pretend there is no difference between collecting rent by legally depriving others of opportunity they would otherwise have, without contributing anything to production, and earning a return by CONTRIBUTING to production, providing others with access to economic opportunity they would NOT otherwise have. You HAVE to contrive some way to prevent yourself from knowing the fact of that difference because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

which means that, economically, it receives interest and/or rent payments just because it exists.

No, again that’s just objectively false. Interest is a return proportional to amount and time that is paid for temporary use of another’s purchasing power. Rent is a return obtained by legally depriving others of access to economic opportunity that would otherwise be accessible. In neither case is the return obtained “just because [the asset] exists.” Interest compensates for risk and time preference; rent is only obtained if someone gets permission to access the opportunity.

'Equities' more-regularly refers to ownership of a share of capital that's actively used in the production of commodities, for capital gains, by exploiting labor-power.

No it doesn’t. It has nothing to do with “production of commodities” or “exploiting labor power,” or any other such silly Marxist trash.

*Of course* capital receives more than it puts-in, otherwise there'd be no economic *incentive* for its involvement -- the gain in value is derived from the economic exploitation of labor ('surplus labor value'), for profits.

You have it backwards: what would be the incentive for workers to use capital in production if it didn’t contribute more than its return? What would be the point? If the capital goods owner isn’t contributing anything in return for his profits, why do the workers even agree to work for him? Why not just do without the capital and keep the full value of their labor?

You're trying to make it sound like rentier-type profits are the result of aristocratic-type 'privileges',

Which is correct. They are. Which is why the rich pursue them so avidly, but have no interest in capital goods except for their own consumption (cars, jets, mansions and what-not).

when in this day and age it's sheerly *economic*, with the political superstructure / paradigm existing to *enforce* those bourgeois, capital-based 'rights', with, and up-to *military* force and destruction.

The “rights” in question are privileges, not property in capital goods, which on average yields little or no return.

But market-based 'pricing' is *ignoring* the regular, systematic input of the material *labor* that created the good or service in the first place.

Because that is what “value” MEANS. No labor at all went into creating land, but its value is nevertheless astronomical.

So you're simply anti-aristocratic, which was from a historical reality *centuries* ago.

Reliance of the rich on privilege -- land titles, bank licenses, IP monopolies, broadcast spectrum allocations, oil and mineral rights, etc. -- for their unearned incomes, wealth and power is still the reality today. If anything, privilege is even more dominant now than it was centuries ago. Certainly land rent has risen as a fraction of the economy, as the astronomical cost of a vacant building lot proves.

The world has since moved to *industrial* production, with the world's commodified workers having a large role in how the machines are run, but without adequate *compensation* for the mass industrial production that they create.

They can't create $#!+ without the contribution by the owner of capital goods, and their underpayment is the result of the privileged depriving them of their rights to liberty and thus their bargaining power, not the capital goods owner offering them access to opportunity they would not otherwise have.

Capital goods play a lesser and lesser role in the capitalist production process the more that technology develops and is relied-upon for the material production of commodities (see the 'Business' diagram, above).

Huh?? Technology IS capital goods. We can only USE technology BY INVESTING in capital goods. Hello?